Events on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley last week brought to mind the moment in Mike Nichols's 1967 film, 'The Graduate', when Mr McGuire comes up to Ben (Dustin Hoffman) and whispers: 'I just want to say one word to you - just one word ... Plastics ... There's a great future in plastics.'To judge by last week, the contemporary equivalent of that one magic word is 'virtualisation'. In crude terms, it's a technology for running several operating systems ('virtual machines') on the same physical computer. Until recently, few outside of geekdom had heard of it. But last week it was the buzzword on Wall Street and provided just about the only good news coming out of New York. How come? What happened was that VMware, the leading exponent of virtualisation, launched on the stock market. The stock soared 76 per cent in the first day's trading, leaving the company with a market capitalisation of $19.1bn and making it Silicon Valley's third-largest home-grown software company after Oracle and Adobe Systems. Tuesday's launch was the largest initial public offering since Google reached a $27bn valuation on its first day out (even then, the search giant's share price rose by only 18 per cent on the day).
