It seems that a desire to learn from Microsoft's expertise was behind the board room knifing of co-founder Diane Greene.

Analysts have been piecing together the VMWare Board's reasons for sacking Greene and replacing her with a former Microsoft executive. According to Network World, the word on the street was that she lacked the business savvy to win a struggle for market share against Microsoft and they wanted someone in who knew the enemy better.

The bloke they have picked is Windows guru Paul Maritz who is more a seasoned and savvy CEO type and knows Microsoft's antics like the back of his hand. After all he played them for long enough.

Avian Securities analyst Jeffrey Gaggin said Green was an engineer and her company had gone from needing a engineer, who thought technically, to needing a good CEO. Burton Group analyst Richard Jones said that even with Maritz, it might be difficult to see off Vole. More than 90 per cent of guest operating systems that run on VMware are Windows servers and if you are using Windows already it is probably easier to use Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualisation software.

There are other rumours that Maritz was put in place so that EMC, which owns VMWare could flog the company.

More here.