Actually, VMware is more like Palm - they started something disruptive and defined the market, but somehow lost the edge (Cloud Foundry is two years after Heroku, four years after Amazon, etc).
However, everyone has caught up enough that there are plenty of choices for competent hypervisors. VirtuaBox, Xen, KVM, Hyper-V - they may not be enterprisey enough yet, but they work fine for more and more cases.