7 posts tagged “microsoft”
We've written more than any other publication about the tension that existed between Tucci and Greene. Such bad blood seemed inevitable once EMC decided to offer part of VMware up in an initial public offering. You've got the stodgy parent company trudging along with a crepe-flat share price, while the young upstart soars into the stratosphere. In fact, at one point not long after the IPO, it looked as if VMware's market capitalization would shoot past that of EMC. Since it still held more than 85 per cent of VMware, EMC benefited from its virtualization arm's gains. Its share price finally started moving up after years of languishing. Thing is, it was Greene's team and not Tucci's that was to thank for the surge. EMC came to look like a hindrance. It was the boring disk seller trying to hold onto to a piece of the future with all its might. Tucci must have hated being put in that position. He'd driven EMC to consistent double-digit growth, but no one cared. And then here comes this hippie wind-surfer from California who receives all of the accolades and pats on the back for her business acumen. People often underestimate Greene. This is understandable to a degree. She's rather short. She's not a bombastic type in public. She comes off as much more of an engineer than a ruthless capitalist. She's a nerd who happened to end up running a company. Those inside of VMware know a much different Greene. She's a hard-driving perfectionist who loves nothing more than to get her way. Employees have talked to us about going into meetings with Greene and crawling into their foxholes, hoping to avoid being struck by criticism or worse, a tirade. We suspect that Tucci became less enamored with Greene's style as VMware's fortunes rose. He would have very little leverage over the firebrand in Palo Alto. She was responsible for making him look good. She wanted too much control of this VMware gem. She caused too many headaches. People kept thinking maybe she should have the EMC CEO post. Ultimately, she had to go. Lucky for Tucci, investors, as they are wont to do, set unrealistic expectations for VMware. The company had doubled revenue every year since its birth. Why expect that party to end just because VMware's revenue had swelled past $1bn? Why think that Microsoft entering the market with a server virtualization product tied to Windows would harm VMware's fortunes? So, with VMware failing to meet these insane goals, Tucci found the opportunity to justify Greene's dismissal as a business decision when it's anything but. Greene always knew what was coming. That's why she drove her team so hard to build out an incredible number of management products over the past few years. It's these products that surround VMware's core hypervisor and which should provide the revenue for VMware in the future. VMware may have grown a bit full of it itself after the IPO, but it never turned complacent. The software maker continued to pump out product after product and to use its new found wealth for acquisitions and finding talent. We suspect VMware will lose some of that focus now that Microsoft ex Paul Maritz has tumbled into the CEO post. Not because Maritz is an underwhelming leader but because VMware will have lost that spark and singular passion that only CEO/founders are usually able to provide. (VMware's chief scientist Mendel Rosenblum, also Greene's husband and company co-founder, can't be long for the company either.) It's nothing less than shocking that Tucci would push to remove Greene just as VMware needed her most. Here comes Microsoft with Hyper-V finally ready, and you're going to rattle the whole ship because of a personality conflict? Er, VMware may have tweaked its revenue forecast for 2008 to be "modestly below" previous guidance of 50 per cent growth. Few executives of multi-billion dollar companies usually get fired for 49 per cent growth, especially with an imploding worldwide economy in the background. But why let such ideas get in the way, Joe? Let's just wave Greene, 30 per cent of VMware's share price and 10 per cent of EMC's share price away because the short lady was kinda hard to get along with sometimes.
Stolen from The Register.
Comment By firing VMware chief Diane Greene, EMC's top dog Joe Tucci has sent a message to investors that his personal likes and dislikes come before their broader interests. That's not exactly what you want to see from an executive who has already done so very little for investors over the past five years.
Read the entire article at Information Week:
...
AN ENDANGERED OS?
Applications will always need an operating system
to run, right? Not with BEA's WebLogic Server Virtual Edition, or
WLS-VE. It replaces the conventional OS with LiquidVM, a
microkernel-based Java virtual machine. In turn, the Java VM runs
directly on a VMware hypervisor, without the need for Windows or Linux.
"We realized the hypervisor had eaten into a lot of what an application
needs from an OS," says Guy Churchward, VP and product manager of
WebLogic products at BEA.
...
Not only will this architecture eliminate OS management costs, Vaughn
says, but he also expects to increase the number of virtual machines
per physical server because of the reduced overhead of a microkernel
vs. a full operating system. In addition, WLS-VE supports several of
VMware's most popular features, including VMotion, which lets managers
move applications from one physical machine to another without
disruption.
...
In 2006, IDC predicted that factory installations of preconfigured
operating systems on servers would decline as customers instead chose
server hardware with a hypervisor preinstalled.
VMware's latest release aims to make that prediction a reality. Last month, it introduced ESX Server 3i, a 32-Mbyte hypervisor that comes integrated with hardware shipped by server vendors, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Fujitsu. These servers will boot directly into a hypervisor. XenSource also announced XenExpress OEM Edition, which will let server vendors install the Xen hypervisor. Xen, which is being acquired by Citrix Systems, says it will announce OEM partners later this year.
...
In many enterprises, the default assumption is that new applications will be deployed in virtualized environments. "Customers are saying they have to justify not virtualizing new apps," says Rich Fomin, lead product manager for BMC Performance Manager.
...
THE KING IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE KING
It's too early to declare a winner in the battle between Microsoft and
VMware. But the upstart has done an admirable job of preparing the
ground in its favor. Every day that Microsoft's hypervisor is absent is
another day VMware's hypervisor gains easy market share. VMware has
assembled a large and growing ecosystem of big and small vendors that
are increasingly making VMware the linchpin of a virtualized data
center.
Most important, the transition to a virtualized environment, in which the operating system is no longer the software foundation of a server infrastructure--and in some cases isn't even required to run applications--robs Microsoft of a core power base.
Virtualization won't kill the operating system, but it does shift the balance of power. The ground is too unstable to declare a new king, but one thing is clear: The throne will be a hypervisor.
There's plenty of good reads on Scott Lowe's blog and I just finished one on his and other's thinking of the future of operating systems:
I do agree with these conclusions on at least one point: The general purpose operating system as we know it will cease to exist in the next 5 to 10 years, perhaps sooner. I do believe that the release of massive development projects such as Windows Vista won’t be the norm moving forward and that, in fact (as others have predicted as well), Windows Vista will be the last of its kind.
Notice I didn’t place Mac OS X in that list as well. Why? Because I think that Apple is capitalizing on an architecture and a convergence of technology that allows it to make Mac OS X into what Windows NT was supposed to be. (Go back and read the stories about the development of Windows NT and look at Dave Cutler’s vision for the operating system—an application environment-agnostic system in which OS/2, Windows, and POSIX-compliant applications could all run without modification.) Does that sound like anything else we have these days? With Mac OS X today, I can run native Macintosh applications, command-line UNIX applications (sometimes straight “out of the box”, sometimes needing a quick recompile), and X11-based applications. Add in something like WINE (the open source Win32 API implementation) and we gain the ability to run many (but not all) Windows applications. Add in a virtualization solution such as that created by VMware or Parallels and you gain the ability to run any Windows application.
Read the rest here.
This year, Red Hat is still one of CIOs' top three vendors, as reported here. The interesting thing to me is not that Red Hat dropped a few places (I'd be ecstatic to be in the top 10, much less consistently rated among the top three), but rather by who sits in the top two slots:
CDW and Trend Micro. Resellers, both of them.
In other words, Red Hat is still the top software company for value (and Cisco is the top hardware company). In fact, as seen below, Red Hat (of all vendors) was
- Rated #1 for increasing those company's revenues;
- Rated #2 for lowering costs; and
- Rated #3 for meeting ROI expectations.
- 90% of its customers would do business with it again.
This is tail-kicking performance and execution. People wondering why Red Hat continues to generate excellent bookings and profit growth need look no further than these numbers. Something for all open source companies to emulate. (Btw, Novell was #23 and Microsoft was #24, which is great for both companies, but not quite #3.)
Pilfered from InfoWorld.
According to Microsoft it's a patent deal and according to Novell
it's an interoperability enabler and joint sales agreement. Now Novell
insists it hasn't acknowledged that Linux treads on Microsoft IP, and
says only that "The intended effect of this agreement was to give our
joint customers peace of mind." It's been an eventful week...
At the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference the other day in Seattle, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (pictured) picked up the biggest, fattest, slitheriest worm out of that can of worms he opened up when he cut that deal with Novell and got Novell to squirming and wishing he hadn't.
Read the rest here.
From ZDNet:
Just days ago we were all asking what Red Hat did to deserve an open assault from Oracle and possibly Novell and Microsoft.
Perhaps all that consternation was a tad premature. After all, the Novell and Microsoft pact on Linux isn't what it's cracked up to be and the two sides are already bickering. Novell even penned an open letter on its rift with Microsoft. So much for a hastily arranged reactive partnership.
Read the rest.By
Ina Fried,
CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: November 8, 2006, 10:24 AM PT
After five years and many twists and turns, Microsoft on Wednesday said that development of Windows Vista is complete.
Windows chief Jim Allchin said Microsoft signed off on the code less than an hour ago. "It's rock solid and we're ready to ship. This is a good day," Allchin said in a conference call.
Allchin said Vista will go on sale to consumers Jan. 30. He said that Microsoft is releasing Vista in five languages. The French, Spanish, and Japanese versions were actually signed off on before the English version, Allchin said.
Click here for the rest.
My Groups
-
Let's Run! Updated: 5 hours ago
-
Unix Updated: Yesterday
-
apple, inc. Updated: Yesterday
