The cycle of change spins ever faster... Really?
Gliding over the dubious validity of overall comparisons between VMware, Hadoop, and NOSQL, let's take the statements in the article at face value.
So, VMware didn't have a serious effect on the industry for a decade? [I'd beg to differ[1], but I'll accept the statement for commentarding purposes]. But Hadoop "started to cause change" after 7 years (2005 to 2012, according to the article), and NOSQL "already having an effect" also after 7 years (2007 to, presumably, 2014)?
This does not show any significant acceleration. On the contrary, the timescales look very similar to me: 7 years - with "started" and "already" qualifiers - against 10 (or, arguably, quite a bit less[1])? Meh...
NB: The above does not, by itself, invalidate other main points of the article. But this particular argument does not hold water, IMHO.
[1] VMware had a very significant impact several years before 2008. From personal recollections, not only was it widely used for workstation virtualization by 2000-2001 (x86 *servers* were not as dominant then as they are now, btw), but starting from about 2004-2006 VMware was a really major platform for server and networking companies on the supply side, and (at least) big banks on the demand side (see also below). EMC bought it for $625M in 2004 - its impact had to be pretty obvious at the time (that's just 5 years after the first product release).
To emphasize the dubiousness of the article's comparison, VMware got a real boost after Intel and AMD built virtualization support into x86 (starting from 2006). This helped VMware win over paravirtualization (e.g., Xen, which is still kicking - think AWS and Citrix - but no longer has the performance advantages of the olden days).
Neither Hadoop nor NOSQL needed this kind of CPU redesign to take off. And still their industry penetration timescale is no faster. I would also argue VMware's impact is a lot wider - Hadoop and NOSQL are very significant niches, but niches nonetheless in comparison. Arguably (yes, one can argue both ways, so don't start), big banks alone were such a niche for VMware before 2008, comparable in scale to big data today.
A more direct comparison to VMware may be provided by KVM, which is already widely used in the Cloud even though its first *stable* release was just over 18 month ago. However, even KVM: a) was ready enough for Red Hat to buy Qumranet back in 2008 (and leveraged the pre-existing QEMU); b) didn't need to wait for CPU support, either, which helped; c) never had to fight for the basic virtualization business case as the pioneers - VMware and Xen - had won that battle several years earlier.