If I could do that back when I worked in development, I might have stuck with it longer.

If I were still working in IT, I'd declare that any software solution pitched to me could not get through my door as a stack of install discs, a quick start guide, and a "give me a call if you run into any trouble."

Leave me with a DVD that has a VM image I can copy to my local drive and execute with the OS's default virtualization engine. If it's a client/server solution, give me two VM images to launch side by side; I can handle that. If it's SOA, give me one image I can launch multiple times. I can handle that, too. That's the kind of task I could hand off to a junior member of my technical staff.

I would have taken a lot more demos from vendors, and taken looks at a lot more intermediate builds if I could have just double-clicked on a virtual disk image with 100 percent certainty that the OS and application would just run.

The turnaround time between a problem report to developers, contractors, tech support, or even Web site designers, and the response could be cut to next to nothing for reproducible problems. You'd run the problematic application or site in a VM, drive it to the point where the error occurs, freeze the virtual machine, and ship its image and the file containing its running state to the responsible developer or support tech.