Rosenblum has been on vacation for a month after Greene's firing, possibly to lessen the bad publicity ahead of VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas which starts next Monday — while Microsoft has been busy introducing its own virtualization technologies in a barnstorming campaign this week. My advice to Greene and Rosenblum? Sell those pre-IPO options as soon as you can, because the stock is bound to dip below the initial price sooner rather than later.

[VMware] employees have talked to us about going into meetings with [cofounder Diane] Greene and crawling into their foxholes, hoping to avoid being struck by criticism or worse, a tirade.

These same employees describe Greene as "a hard-driving perfectionist who loves nothing more than to get her way." But despite her flaring temper, VMware cofounder Diane Greene's underlings loved her as the head of their company, especially as her dictatorial management style helped send its stock through the roof. But the stock eventually faltered, and Greene's tempestuous attitude threatened Joe Tucci, CEO of VMware's parent company, EMC. Greene and Tucci never got along, and so when Tucci got the chance, he pushed Greene out of the company.

Next: Ex-Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg: Hot head, hot lead

(Photo by AP/Risberg)

Very fair with compensation and one gets the feeling the core founders (Diane, Mendel, etc) really care about people working in a good and healthy environment.

Tucci's Glassdoor approval rating has improved from the 44 percent level which qualified him for our list of tech's 10 worst rated CEOs. Does anyone smell an astroturfing campaign? Even with the suspiciously speedy improvement, Tucci enjoyes far less support from his reviewers. One headlines a review: “Joe Tucci knows what stockholders want to hear and uses that to maximize HIS compensation.” Another, among the more positive reviews, hardly helps Tucci's cause:

Joe Tucci has done a good job of leading the company through some tough times, but is he an innovator or visionary like Gates, Jobs, or even Larry Ellison? Maybe that's what is needed to boost the company's profile - and stock price.

As early as September 2007 — when analysts began wondering how long it would be before VMware's market capitalization would outgrow EMC's — rumor had it a rivalry of intense personal animosity was brewing between Greene and Tucci. Tucci supposedly disdained Greene's intense managerial style, one that would, according to Vance, have employees "going into meetings with Greene and crawling into their foxholes, hoping to avoid being struck by criticism or worse, a tirade." Vance posits that as VMware grew to be EMC's growth engine, Greene got too heady in her power and turned some of that intensity toward her sort of, kind of, not-really-because-he-needs-me-more-than-I-need-him boss, Tucci. If so, it's hard to think of anyone more deserving, since Tucci's no wallflower himself. Anyone have good Greene stories? Or Tucci tales? Send them in. (Photo by AP/Risberg)

Once a high-flyer at Microsoft, Maritz was ousted in one of the software giant's typically obscure internecine battles back in 2000. Since then, he's quietly stewed in exile, starting a small software company which was bought by EMC, VMware's parent.

A lucky break for EMC to have Maritz on its bench. Ignore his cuddly-programmer looks; he is fearsome, and deservedly hated by enemies. Antitrust superlawyer David Boies couldn't make a dent in Maritz's armor when the executive took the stand in Microsoft's 1990s antitrust trial. VMware is up for a bruising battle with Microsoft for its software niche, which involves tools to let a computer server act like several separate ones — but I'm thinking Microsoft is the one we should feel sorry for.

Maritz's generation of leaders has mostly retired at Microsoft, yet most of their replacements' freshly scrubbed faces are still familiar to him. He knows all of Microsoft's dirty tricks, and he will enjoy serving them back at the young ones he once taught them to. This will be fun.

(Photo by ifindkarma)

VeriSign chairman Jim Bidzos
An employee's advice to senior management:

Don't drag out the divestiture process in an effort to get a few extra bucks. And if you're going to kill the whole thing, be honest with employees about opportunities.

AMD chairman and CEO Hector Ruiz
An employee's advice to senior management:

AMD needs to go back to basics. What business is AMD in, who do you need onboard to lead the company in that business, who do you need that can create demand for the product, and what do the customers want? Ignore the "how" and focus on the "who." Stop treating employees like costs and more like assets. Threatening cubical hoteling and pushing the "do more with less" story is oppressive, not inspiring. The most marketable talent will leave first.

EMC CEO and chairman Joe Tucci
An employee's advice to senior management:

Senior management needs to respect its employees, listen to feedback and not bury its head in the sand as it relates to issues of sexism and lack of diversity. The culture continues to be predominantly young white men and this is largely because people hire who they know. "Breaking the glass ceiling" requires a lot of sacrifice! They will cite a few examples of high profile women, but these are the exception, not the rule. Work/life balance is not a priority in this company. Most of the highest ranking professional women in this organization are unmarried or do not have children. They need to recognize the need for more flexible work options that promote the importance of family. And most importantly, there need to be consequences for illegal and unethical behavior, regardless of who commits it! People cannot be protected from this. There are too many blind eyes turned when sexual harassment, illegal business practices, or other unethical acts occur.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang

An employee's advice to senior management:

Be more open to the workforce opinions. Be more humble. Be less political. Listen more, do more, and quickly.

eBay CEO John Donahoe
An employee's advice to senior management:

Streamline the process so people can focus more on getting their work done. Share more of the details of the vision for eBay and the competition of eBay.

Symantec CEO John Thompson
An employee's advice to senior management:

Open your eyes to how the actually successful companies are doing it. Use your talent pool and clear the way to innovate internally. Shift the focus from salesmanship to inherent quality. Build products that sell themselves rather than needing an aggresive sales cycle to move.

Hewlett-Packard chairman, president and CEO Mark Hurd
An employee's advice to senior management:

Stop screwing the employees. Stop reducing benefits every week. Stop saying you plan to invest in research and development when you are actually reducing everything except your bonuses. Start treating people as people. Get some moral fiber.

EDS chairman, president and CEO Ron Rittenmeyer
An employee's advice to senior management:

As I said above, either learn to trust the junior leadership you put into place or replace them. Set goals and then GET OUT OF THE WAY and allow the leadership the flexibility to execute to them. If they don't perform, release them. The micromanagement culture has to stop.

IBM chairman, president and CEO Sam Palmisano
An employee's advice to senior management:

One thing is missing though, an acceptance of the fact that there are "superstars" in the world, and that these superstars perform several orders of magnitude better than regular employees. What is missing within IBM is the ability to seek out, and nourish these superstars. Over time superstars will leave IBM because they will get much more recognition in other organizations. This has an impact on IBM's ability to deliver some things.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
An employee's advice to senior management:

There is a severe lack of leadership in the company. With so many things going on it takes executives too long to commit to business decisions and too long to pick up on competitive responses to disruptive technologies.Microsoft promotes based on 2 facets - technical knowledge and political saavy. What Microsoft does not promote based on is leadership ability, managerial ability or business saavy.

(Photo of Ballmer by AP/Sarbach)

Virtualization allows one computer to run multiple "virtual machines," with different operating systems. If one crashes, it won't bring the others down, and also allows for better security and more efficient allocation of resources. At the end of the day, this billion-dollar-spat between Microsoft and VMware means one thing to non-sysadmins: You can get away with cutting your hardware budget next year. Sorry, Dell.

Mozy, with online-backup plans starting at $4.95 a month, opens up EMC to businesses that would never bother to buy their own servers. And Mozy itself, as it adds hardware to cope with growing demand, makes a fine in-house buyer of EMC hardware. That's the business logic, anyway. In practice, there's a flood of online-storage startups on the market, and EMC may find the consumer business tough sledding. That makes me think of a less rational, but emotionally satisfying, explanation for EMC's Mozy buy: Boring enterprise businesses like EMC have a bad case of Google envy, and want to tap the consumer market to salve executives' ego and perhaps boost their market cap.

And the one who asked, when you won an award for a presentation, if you were wearing "those" heels during the presentation — fair question. (The ones who asked to see your "jungle nipples" might have crossed the line.)

But the thing is, while good parents and goals and and a strong sense of self blah blah can go far to protect against the abuses doled out by idiot, power-hungry dudes in bed, the office is another story. For one thing, for all y'all who are lacking in the rich husband department, it's your livelihood. More importantly, it's probably a critical component of your identity. So when we read shit like this:

When she was 15 she got her very first job working nights and weekends at a mom and pop deli store. The kids in the family, who were her age, worked there too so she got to know the whole family. One late night she was sweeping up and the 40+ dad of the family came up and grabbed her from behind. When she freaked out he patiently explained that this was the whole purpose for hiring her and that she shouldn't be so naive. Completely traumatuzed she started crying and he gave her a big hug, consoled her and said it was best to never speak of this to anyone, as to not jeopardize their "friendship". She didn't quit the job, and didn't tell anyone until years later because he had talked her into thinking she had brought it on herself. She confided in me MUCH later that she actually felt grateful at the time that he was so understanding.

...a stripper was hired to come to the hotel where a company meeting was being held to celebrate the promotion of two managers. Ms. Nelson left the room and waited in the hallway, her lawsuit said. While waiting there, she heard male salesmen who left the room saying that her "boss licked whipped-cream off the strippers' breasts," her complaint said.

I once had a boss who'd chew out his (silent) wife in front of me; another liked to walk around shirtless, "tackle" female employees in the hallways and give his female assistants pet names synonymous with "Retard." Naturally, the environment came straight from the top; I just ran into a girl who told me that old boss's boss had recently instructed her to take off her coat so he could inspect her outfit, only to instruct her to wear something tighter, with higher heels. This girl was an editor, for fuck's sake. But none of this shit is even so bad; it's the notion that women can't be smart - or that women who are smart are thereby "crazy" "divas" - that usually accompanies it that is the worst. A policy wonk friend of ours had a graduate school internship wherein she was required to trim the edges off newspaper clippings for one of the policy analysts; her current job isn't much better. A certain Jezebel intern used to work for a publisher who asked her to "remove splinters from his hand and share his distaste for the plain looking fat-ish girls at the magazine." He also made her fetch him cappuccino every hour and "slapped his secretary's ass once in awhile," while he kept all real business from the female editors and assigned "the random man who was like the office manager" to do all the editorial work. Another (Jewish) friend had a boss who told the charming joke "How do you get a Jewish girl to stop fucking?" (Answer: Marry her. Ha!) And a friend of ours who was lucky enough to get her own ass slapped waiting tables at the poker room at the Golden Eagle Country Club in Tallahassee, Florida actually complained about it — after which only male servers were allowed to work the poker room. Anyway, in case you didn't get it — don't feel bad, the thickest girls have the nicest racks! wink — this is your repository for sexist boss stories. As long as you're still at work, you might as well give them up.

A Data Storage Titan Confronts Bias Claims [WSJ]

It means an avalanche of IPO filings, sooner rather than later. Since Google's IPO in 2004, there's been a dearth of public offerings, leaving investors starved for new issues to invest in. Expect lawyers and bankers in Palo Alto and San Francisco to, once again, start burning the midnight oil preparing S-1 filings.

VMware's IPO today was what, in the bad old days of the first Internet boom, the most facile commentators dubbed a "moonshot" — an IPO with a clear trajectory upwards, never mind the fundamentals. VMware's offering was clearly underpriced, raising almost a billion dollars less than it could have if its investment bankers had guessed more accurately how much demand there would be for its shares. Of course, a successful IPO is good PR, but that much money left on the table seems like a high price to pay for a moonshot.

The question, of course, for future companies seeking their own moonshot IPO is whether they can repeat VMware's feat. VMware's in a hot market — so-called "virtualization" software, which lets companies more efficiently use the servers they have for multiple tasks. It's a real business, in other words, with deep-pocketed customers.

It's likely that Facebook and other oft-mentioned IPO contenders can ride the current market's hunger for tech. Right now, investors are looking for anything that doesn't have "subprime" in its business description. But as the markets calm down, and investors grow more discriminating, investors will, one hopes, ask hard questions. At the very least, questions harder than "How high will this moonshot rise?"