Mendel Rosenblum, chief scientist and co-founder of virtualization vendor Vmware claims that operating systems are doomed.

In a keynote to the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco Rosenblum said that virtualization will eventually make today's complex operating systems obsolete.

When you have a virtualization layer tied to the microprocessor and hardware running virtual machines designed to run specific applications, the operating system is less important.

By merging the OS and software would create a module that would be more reliable and secure, easier to manage and offer higher performance.

Rosenblum said the better architecture is to build software for a virtualization appliance. Software makers could package within a virtual machine only those components needed to run a particular application.

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