What a Week

Paul Maritz must have had a reasonable idea of what he was getting into. In most aspects VMWorld was been a smashing success -- large and enthusiastic crowds, a big ecosystem pavilion. Paul did an excellent job on the keynote considering he had been on the job for all of 10 weeks (he was blessed by the fact that Diane Green was truly an awful public speaker so the hurdle was low) that dovetailed nicely with CTO Steve Herrod's excellent technical keynote the next day. Maritz sounded more like the leader of a $2B software company than VMware. The plans sound like business plans: (1) Paul admits they are really a platform vendor and they talk about a Data Center OS, (2) he put a stake in the ground that the Cloud was going to be a real business and (3) that they were getting serious about VDI (now branded as vClient). All of this makes sense if you're trying to answer the question "How will VMware make money?" (the question that Diane never wanted to talk about it). On the other hand, with the collapse of the "virtualization" reality distortion field came a further (and I'm sure painful) deflation of the stock, taking it down well under the initial IPO price. Some of the commentators apparently never realized that VMware really does compete with the big boys. Oh well...