Derek,
I know we disagree on some of the details, but please remember that we agree that once PT Barnum got involved, it became a scam. I really believe CCP is the biggest loser, and given that they were the ones who controlled the companies during the Sphere 3D/OVRL shotgun wedding that brought PT into power, in the end there is some justice in their losses.
I still believe that Glassware likely "worked", but that "working" is irrelevant. There is nothing extraordinary about making what is now called a "hypervisor" work. It does, however, require a very significant effort beyond that point to make one useful, and even after putting a few hundred million into the effort it will never be all things to all people, just a niche product.
In the industry there is typically another version of the 90/10 rule, where it takes 10 percent of the time to get the technology demonstrator working, and the remaining 90 percent of the time to get it to market. With a hypervisor, however, its more like a 99/1 rule. A working hypervisor is only a very small component of a product that at best is ultimately useable by even a small segment of the market. Perhaps the most successful virtualization products out there are ones developed by Citrix. I just googled them, and the first line that popped up claimed "Citrix enables business mobility through the secure delivery of apps and data to any device on any network.", a phrase almost identical to what Sphere 3D claimed, and in particular noting the word "any". But even at that, Citrix is a long way from being able to handle most real-world applications. (Note that it doesn't say "any application" anywhere in their catch phrase.) It is a very useful and valuable product if you can constrain your applications to Citrix's capabilities, but it is only useful under those constraints.
Back in the 1970s, IBM distributed a virtualization product named "VM". It wasn't intended as an operational product, but more of a testing tool. Nevertheless, by the 1980s many customers adopted it for use in what amounts to the same type of applications that Citrix caters to today. (I used it in both contexts, as a system test tool and later as a customer within a vendor's application environment). The problem is that PC's, and PC operating systems, aren't anywhere near as well architected for virtualization as the IBM System/370s were, and also the expansion of networking and the entanglement of networking technologies has rendered some of the additional benefits of virtualization impractical. The approach with PC's has therefore been to try to plug all of holes in the dyke, and there are a huge number of holes. This, more than anything else, results in the 99/1.
In the end, "works" in a test doesn't/didn't mean anything to anyone outside of the R&D lab. The fraud was in implying that it did, and even more so, pretending that it was time to "sell, sell, sell".
I think PT was way too big a fool to understand any of this, and anyway, understanding why the product he promoted could never be what he promoted wasn't part of his job. He was there solely to make a sow's ear look like a silk purse.
I've sat in the boardroom of a competitor and listened to a much younger, self-appointed messiah make a virtualization promise to a CEO that I knew from my experience was technically impossible. It took the clown about six months to find out for himself and quietly back down his promises, and another couple of years before the consequences of the failure was conspicuous enough to result in the cancellation of the product. I estimate that the CEO wound up wasting about $25M as a result. (The really foolish part was that the CEO turned around and repeated the mistake a couple more times over the next several years.) In the case of ANY, CCP is acting in the role of that CEO. At least they are getting what they deserve.
That's probably not a lot of consolation. If I had any say in the matter, I would give PT a lifetime ban. Having people like him involved in public companies damages the legitimate capitalization requirements of everyone. I think two strikes are enough.
