VMWare ousts founder | Hacker News Reader

VMWare ousts founder

bloomberg.com

35 pointswmorein27 comments

She was just featured in the most recent Economist:

http://www.economist.com/people/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11...

Its a sad day when the founder is ousted. I wonder why Vmware is in trouble. I can't imagine it is because of Greene.

I think virtual machine technology has great potential.

"Trouble" in the crazy stock market sense. They are not reaching "growth targets", which means she isn't pushing hard enough for growth. In reality she's probably a great boss, but just not cut out for running a public company owned by another company.

I'd feel bad for her, but I'm sure she has plenty of money. She apparently loves windsurfing, so they should just move back to Hawaii and have fun. Her picture looks like she's in her 50s, so she should just retire early and have lots of fun in the sun.

It's a recession, and a lot of companies are waiting on their capital improvements right now. This one surprises me in how impatient they're being, or there's something else going on.

projections for 2008 was +50% growth. vmware didn't manage that, but it's not a reason to oust the ceo.

this is a highly political move

another article showing that vmware might have been too successful for emc's ceo http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/08/tucci_costs_vmware/

Yea, being somewhat below 50% growth in sales for a year is "Trouble".

VMware has been skimming the cream off the virtualization market and making enormous profit in the process, but that can't continue forever. Soon they must choose between sticking with the small but high-margin enterprise consolidation business and growing with lower margins.

Probably due to the inroads made by KVM and the like.

MS's free as in beer virtual server, perhaps?

Sun VirtualBox.

* No

Those are all desktop technologies. VMware make the majority of their revenue from dedicated virtualization servers, that connect to a shared SAN, and allow VMs to be moved from one physical server to another while running.

Their competitors are:

* Microsoft HyperV (missed inclusion inWin2K8, but available as a seperate download - can't move VMs without downtime). Management through MMC.

* RHEL Advanced Server (RHEL 5 with oVirt, a web based management tool, or Virtual Machine Manager, a shitty desktop based one. KVM/Xen is used as the engine, with a preference towards KVM. Not sure on moving VMs, know its planned but haven't payed with it much.

* Citrix Xenserver

* Hosted Xen, eg Amazon EC2.

Is that actually true?

As far as I know, desktop virtualization (for developers and QA) is a large chunk of VMware's business, indeed it's where they got their start.

Yeah. Desktop virt for developers and QA is certainly visible.

Virtualized server farms, OTOH, are transparent. You could be logging into a VM and never know unless you ran dmidecode (Linux) or Get_WMIObject Vendor (Windows, IIRC).

That VM could also be moving from one physical machine to another while you're logged into it. You'd never know.

Last project I worked on was at a bank, with a few hundred VMs used to replicate the prod environment about 18 times. Project budget was $450M AU, about $400M US. VMware got a good chunk of that.

Their desktop products like vmplayer, vmware server are free.

Wow. The interesting part of this story is that VMWare was founded by a woman. Fascinating.

Best to call her the "co-founder." She's the non-technical head. The technical co-founder is her husband, Mendel Rosenblum, who created the first robust implementation of x86 virtualization.

Quite impressive that these two have been together so long without the business partnership or marriage falling apart.

I'm pretty sure people who know her from her UCB days (she was peripherally involved with Stonebraker's research) would say it's a mistake to call Diane "non-technical".

I suspect it bound them together actually. When a couple shares its labour it can become a important part of the relationship. Also, since they're husband and wife, I suspect that they combine their incomes, and so that partially deals with the money issue.

Even better - take a look at http://www.vmware.com/company/leadership.html. One of the co-founders, Edward Wang, "also helped to neutralize the infamous Internet Worm virus by discovering and describing one of its key mechanisms."

Pretty exhilarating technical prose:

"With Microscope and Tweezers: An Analysis of the Internet Virus of November 1988"

http://www.mit.edu/people/eichin/virus/main.html

"The Internet Worm Incident Technical Report"

http://homes.cerias.purdue.edu/~spaf/tech-reps/933.pdf

As a nice aside, when I was at a (British) college in about 1995, years before I got on the internet, I read about Robert Morris and the internet worm, and now I'm posting on a forum created by a good friend of his!

I find it interesting that I spent the first half of my life lusting after communications technology, and the second half getting to grips with it all and even contributing a little.

Wow. This going to come back to slap EMC in the face, just like what happened back with Moshe Yanai. It looks like the EMC management can't retain it's most valuable employees.

What happened with Moshe Yanai? I can't find much on Google.

Nov. 2001: "Moshe Yanai, VP of engineering at EMC and the inventor of its Symmetrix flagship storage array, has received a cut of Symmetrix sales for over a decade. And they maintain that the arrangement has thwarted EMC’s ability to create new hardware for a tougher market. ... EMC denies rumors that Yanai is set to leave the company." http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=9644

Dec. 2001: "the chief engineer would no longer oversee the company's hardware division and, instead, would become an adviser to CEO Joseph Tucci. ... Yanai was pushed aside and really sidelined." http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2001/12/24/newscol...

2002: "XIV is led by Moshe Yanai, one of the key architects of data storage systems and instrumental in the development of EMC's Symmetrix and DMX product lines throughout the 1990s." http://www.xivstorage.com/company/company_background.asp

2008: XIV bought by IBM to compete against EMC.

Can't retain? It looks like Greene was fired. If they wanted to retain her, they would have.

Which makes it even worse.

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