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.