

Paul Maritz Out As VMware CEO - taurussai
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/16/paul-maritz-out-as-vmware-ceo-and-mentioned-as-candidate-for-top-spot-at-emc-or-cloud-foundry-spin-off/

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nl
The GigaOM analysis[1] is fairly good.

 _“They’re trying to optimize for revenue instead of market share and — good,
God — Maritz if anyone should know that they need to occupy the high-share,
high-volume, low-price position, which is what Microsoft did to destroy the
legacy Unix OS business. VMware is behaving more like a legacy player than
anything.”_

[1] [http://gigaom.com/cloud/vmware-seeking-scale-took-its-eye-
of...](http://gigaom.com/cloud/vmware-seeking-scale-took-its-eye-off-the-
ball/)

~~~
rwmj
(Answering the GigaOM analysis ...)

They _are_ a legacy player. Virtualization is available in just about every
chipset and for free in the Linux kernel and newer Windows. Sure, they may
still have some advantages in some areas, perhaps better high end management
software, but it's really only a matter of time before _everything_ they do is
available at no cost somewhere else.

Anecdotally every one of our customers is looking to get rid of VMware.

~~~
nl
_They are a legacy player._

But it didn't have to be that way.

Things maybe available at no cost, but you can be damn well sure that a lot of
companies _want_ to pay. That's why Citrix does so well from Xen, and RedHat
from Enterprise Virtualization.

If VMWare had been more aggressive in their pricing they could have flooded
the market to the point where they would have been the default choice, and
cheap enough that no one would bother looking elsewhere.

The VMWare customers I know are looking elsewhere too, but it is reluctantly.
They don't actively want to move, but the cost savings are just too big to
ignore.

------
suprgeek
Yes he may be out as CEO of VMWare ...but the more interesting part of the
news is :

Is he the new Head honcho for EMC (a sure promotion)?

Is he the new leader of the (soon to be spun-off) new cloud business?

Is he "out" as in "not related to anything VMWare or EMC any more"?

I think this is just the first act - more to follow soon.

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vorg
Didn't Rod Johnson, CEO of Vmware's SpringSource division, announce his
retirement 12 days ago, without giving a reason? Did he know about this and
got out before the axes fell?
[http://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2012/07/rod-johnson-
leav...](http://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2012/07/rod-johnson-leaves-
vmware.aspx)

Sounds like there's some restructuring going on there. The retrenchments are
coming...

------
dm8
Interesting to see two major CEO changes today. However, has anyone used Cloud
Foundry? And why everyone wants to get into "cloud provider" business?

Amazon is winning that market on price and features. And big players like
Google, Microsoft etc. are good enough for competition.

Not to mention other established companies like Rackspace, Heroku who have
loyal user base.

~~~
ajross
More to the point: Amazon is winning that market using an open source stack
which is frankly better and more performant than vmware's stuff. This company
had some amazing stuff back in the day, but they've been passed
technologically by the market and refused to open their products for too long.
It should have been clear this was going to happen the instant the VT-x specs
were published. But they turtled instead of innovating.

Their desktop solution is still pretty good, I hear. I don't use it though, as
kvm works fine for my needs. And selling to a small market (developers) in
competition with multiple free solutions isn't a good place to be.

~~~
unimpressive
> Amazon is winning that market using an open source stack

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/04/03/be-wary-
of...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/04/03/be-wary-of-geeks-
bearing-gifts/)

Leaving that here...(Ignore the article, read the single comment below by Jim
Plamondon.)

~~~
dm8
On a side note, Forbes website has terrible UX. First I'm presented with page-
takeover ad. Then page is full of flash based ads. Page loading was terribly
slow. Looking at web inspector, it made ~ 266 requests for ~ 187 KB of data.
And it took 14 seconds to load it (even though I'm on fast corporate n/w). On
top of that, I can't find single comment on the article. Then I see "Expand
comments" in small font. In confusion, I click the link and then I saw the
comment by Jim. What is tech team doing at Forbes? Imagine if I'm accessing it
on mobile device.

~~~
mst
Whenever I'm faced with something like this, I remind myself of the essential
question to ask when deciding how to prioritise work on a content site:

How will this affect advertising revenue?

Having a design HN hates may correlate with losing significant numbers of
users and therefore revenue over time ... but then again it may not, and
there's always the opportunity cost quesstion when deciding how to calibrate
"significant numbers".

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onedev
Wow, I'm at a loss for words. We all love him here, can't wait to find out
what really happened.

~~~
mxttr0
Nothing really happened is my guess. It's just been 4 years since he took the
top job and he is moving on after vesting his stock/option grants (not that he
needs them though).

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chris_wot
Screwed by EMC? The way EMC runs companies I'm surprised VMWare is still
around! And now that Gelsinger is at the helm... Well, would suck to work
there ATM!

