Sure, I agree with you, there was no "huge paradigm shift" (that is so extremely rare in CS).
But there was a virtualization efficiency advance that got an impressive number of companies to actively jump into the project (with time and money) which (along with it being free) made it explode, mature, and eventually make things like commodity computing rental via EC2 possible to implement just years later.
I agree with him that there is so much established infrastructure/standardization out there that doing something completely game changing is hard if not impossible. Which is why I think weighing things against such a behemoth industry, Xen's story is impressive.
It did what he wanted: "Make the industry want your work." But it's because it is useful, not just because it is cool. As for grant money's role in all this, it's the same issue. Like arts and humanities vs. energy/science, the lion's share of research funding is always going to go towards what will most likely advance the country's economy/technology.
> because it is useful, not just because it is cool
Seems like Pike's own opinions migrated towards an acceptance of this, from jackchristopher's slashdot link [1]:
"Applications - web browsers, MP3 players, games, all that jazz - and networks are where the action is today, and aside from irritating little incompatibilities, the kernel has become a commodity. Almost all the programs I care about can run above Windows, Unix, Plan 9, and on PCs, Macs, palmtops and more. And that, of course, is why these all have a POSIX interface: so they can support those applications."
> But there was a virtualization efficiency advance
You are just reinforcing Rob's point. Xen doesn't do anything new, it is simply an optimization, that doesn't mean it is not useful (as he also points out), but confirms his point that all 'research' this days is just optimizations and 'phenomenology', and nothing that is and feels truly different and new.
In the end Xen is a textbook illustration of the problems he is pointing at.
People across the globe are doing something that is and feels truly different and new: they're thinking and arranging their entire stacks in terms of remote virtual machines.
We could argue about the definition of novelty all day and in the end I think it's simply a judgement call what one deems as exciting or worth talking about. If you're looking for something so profoundly different along the lines of Einstein and Heisenberg in physics, I agree with him through and through, nothing in systems will probably happen like that given the current funding paradigms (I can't actually think of anything like that in the history of computer science -- you can for example be as reductionist as you want if you want to take Pike's side of the argument: "oh, it's all just a collection of logic gates"...).
> People across the globe are doing something that is and feels truly different and new: they're thinking and arranging their entire stacks in terms of remote virtual machines.
Except that there had been people doing precisely that for ages. Seems that computer science is condemned to eternally reinvent wheels... sigh
Well, in the seventies IBM mainframes had the Control Program (CP) and what is now the z/VM hypervisor, so yes precisely the same paradigm was dominant in architecting systems back then.
Sure, squint hard enough and it's the "precisely the same." Being in a virtualization/utility-computing job for the last five years, I've heard this kind of quip over and over and I agree with it on the surface but it's true only in the most general ways.
I guess I was not specific enough above with simply saying "remote virtual machines." With a credit card almost anyone can rent thousands of machines programatically (with redundancy across multiple datacenters if you want) and be using them in minutes. And make them go away just as quickly. And construct the VMs themselves programatically or by hand on a laptop. And the people renting out the hardware don't need to even trust you. All of this is a new development that changes the way business is done. Like I said above, you can say everything is "just" logic gates plus electricity and claim nothing new ever happens (and I'll agree with you, too, I just won't think the conversation is going anywhere interesting).
Hypervisors and virutalization have been around since the late '60s.