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)

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg strikes us as more concerned with her personal PR than with the boring but important operational problems she was hired to solve. Yahoo president Sue Decker can be as Machiavellian as any guy, but her boneheaded reorgs are responsible for much of the company's current straits. Greene was one of the few women leaders in the Valley who seemed worthy of out-and-out admiration. That she was ousted by a jealous man makes the absence of her equals all the more glaring.

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)

Company shares are down 30 percent so far on the day. The people who get paid enough to watch and report on the virtualization industry say it's Microsoft that has put the squeeze on VMware, by building virtualization features into Windows. Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman, for example, says Microsoft's virtualization features — it launched "Hyper-V" in June — will probably take over the virtualization market among small to medium-sized enterprises. Greene founded VMware in 1998 and sold it to EMC in 2003. The experience has likely made her wealthy, but not happy. (Photo by AP/Risberg)

First, VMWare commands its sales team to call the Microsoft announcement a "desperate" "hodge-podge":

Microsoft announced a hodge-podge of items related to virtualization in a desperate attempt to make it look like it had a new, coherent vision and strategy for virtualization...
MSFT includes many recycled items in the announcement to make it look substantive. In actuality, they are just rehashes of old items. Microsoft is not delivering anything new, substituting marketing in place of real substance...
The new items are a collection of loosely connected pieces thrown together to look like a coherent virtualization plan. Microsoft is still talking vision...

Microsoft's announcement introduces new conflicts into the Microsoft-Citrix business partnership and begs the question "When will Microsoft dump Citrix and take all of the business for itself?" Is this just a partnership of convenience for Microsoft until it ships its own product?
Tell your prospects that are considering Citrix, that MSFT will soon cut Citrix out of the loop ... and Citrix is allowing it to happen.
New Conflict #1: Microsoft System Center or Citrix XenServer for Management. This declaration hits at the heart of Citrix's stated business model for virtualization — to generate revenue from the management of Windows virtual machines with Citrix XenCenter. System Center and XenCenter are clearly competitors.
New Conflict #2: Calista acquisition creates more direct competition with Citrix SpeedScreen (ICA). This acquisition strikes at Citrix's core business since ICA is Citrix's key differentiator and competes with RDP.

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.

Virgin Mobile, unlike the big carriers, rents a wireless network rather than owning one, essentially gussying up and reselling Sprint's service under its own name. It's a challenging business model, known in the trade as being a "mobile virtual network operator" or "MVNO." Disney and Amp'd, among others, have failed to make a go of it.

Renting one's network means lower capital costs, and according to the Wall Street Journal, Virgin has 4.83 million subscribers and actually made a small profit this year. Virgin Mobile has plenty of revenue, but with a flat IPO today and loads of debt, it is unclear if it can make itself into a viable company.

Disney Mobile shut down last month and Amp'd burned through hundreds of millions of dollars with nothing to show for it. History does not look good for Virgin, but with strong name recognition among their target market and clever advertising, we don't put it past Sir Richard to succeed where others have failed.

(Photo by AP/Jacques Brinon)

No surprise, of course. Isn't BEA a former darling of the VCs and the stock market? Isn't VMware a current darling of the VC's and the stock market? Last week, anyone walking across Fourth and Howard in San Francisco could be forgiven for feeling as though they we looking at "before" and "after" shots. VMware would be the quintessential "before," meaning, they're currently worth billions since Microsoft has barely even stepped into its market for "virtualization" software. BEA Systems would be the "after," showing off the results of having IBM, Sun, and Oracle all stomp into its application-server sphere of influence.

BEA's currently got a rogue stock holder demanding the company be sold off (Oracle, you listening?). VMware is still snug in EMC's bed, around 90 percent of its stock safely in those big ass EMC vaults of cash — meaing it only has one real shareholder to please.

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?"