Microsoft's infamous "tilt into the death spiral" humour is not so funny. Rather than build superior products it is trying to destroy rivals and eliminate choice in the market, not only to reduce real choice. Today's new discussion is based on VMware, which was covered extensively in the past two days' news.
“Therein you have many of the characteristic of what Microsoft refers to as "The Slog", which is beyond just "guerrilla marketing".”We have already documented some examples of Microsoft tactics for countering competition. Familiar patterns include dumping, shared monopoly alliances, financial games, targeted brain drains, and aggressive/hostile acquisitions. That last pattern happens to be a warning about Microsoft's attempts to scoop up or attack the competitors one by one.
A previous post showed some new example of cases where Microsoft executives influence Microsoft's potential rivals, which no longer are. They are likely to become more obedient due to the inter-personal issues at play (bearing in mind that companies are just people and -- accordingly -- their behaviour is a personal thing too).
Some of the latest maneuvers against VMware are being played while insulting the competition using paid allies, e.g. Yankee Group [1, 2], and having partners make a lot of noise over yet-inexistent Microsoft technology. Therein you have many of the characteristic of what Microsoft refers to as "The Slog", which is beyond just "guerrilla marketing".
Looking at VMware for some details, Vance reveals the ugly story behind it.
In the summer of 2007, Diane Greene was lauded as a business hero for leading VMware, a maker of business software, to the hottest stock debut since Google. But in the ensuing year, despite her popularity with employees and on Wall Street, her relationship with her directors, and especially VMware’s chairman, Joseph M. Tucci, grew increasingly chilly.
On July 7, she found out just how cold it had become. After Ms. Greene made a special presentation to VMware’s board, Mr. Tucci, who heads VMware’s parent company, EMC, pulled her aside, according to people familiar with the events, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal company decisions.
Inviting Mendel Rosenblum, Ms. Greene’s husband and the co-founder of VMware, into the room, Mr. Tucci told Ms. Greene she was fired, effective immediately. And he said the board wanted Mr. Rosenblum, VMware’s chief scientist, to take her seat on the board. Mr. Rosenblum declined the offer.
[...]
And VMware’s new chief executive, Paul Maritz, once a top executive at Microsoft, is fighting to articulate how VMware can evolve from a darling upstart to a mature player capable of maintaining its growth while facing off against some of the world’s technology heavyweights.
We've been told virtualization is the fastest evolving sector of the computing industry. But now, VMware is running on autopilot without its key scientists, and Microsoft hopes another delay won't hurt it too much.
[...]
Rosenblum's colleague, executive vice president for R&D D. Richard Sarwal, resigned from VMware just last week to return to his former employer, Oracle. And The New York Times learned that Paul Chan, VMware's VP for product development, already left the company last month without the company making a sound.
AMD HAS TEAMED up with Microsoft in a bid to jointly take a bigger slice of the server virtualisation market.
The two companies are offering a joint model which combines the Opteron's AMD-V and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V to streamline virtualisation on a hardware and software level.
"Microsoft has been working closely with the likes of Novell and Citrix to ensure support for non-Microsoft technology."
Novell today announced Ron Hovsepian, president and CEO, will deliver a keynote at Interop New York on Wednesday, Sept. 17 at 10 a.m, at Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. The Interop New York conference is focused on providing comprehensive thought-leadership on key IT topics and the future of business technology. In line with those themes, the keynote, "Making IT Work As One," will outline Novell's solutions strategy, with a focus on delivering customer value by reducing cost, complexity and risk in today's mixed IT environments.
Microsoft offers free Hyper-V stand-alone version
[...]
Hyper-V is Microsoft's entry into the crowded field of virtualization vendors where the hypervisor is looking more and more like a commodity. VMware is the dominant player, but Citrix, Oracle, Red Hat, Sun and Novell are among those offering virtualization technology.
--Microsoft, internal document [PDF]
Comments
DOUGman
2008-09-10 23:20:26
D.
Jose_X
2008-09-11 02:46:33
Maybe things went down like this:
Some big players (not necessarily just at Microsoft but maybe) decided closed-source VMWare did not stand a long-term chance without levers and anchors like Microsoft has. After convincing key EMC people also worried to death about FOSS (eg, Tucci), it was likely decided they would get (the equiv of) money to buy VMWare. The technology would be allowed to migrate over to Microsoft. They took it public in order to squeeze out remaining value in VMWare by dumping inflated shares on the public. Also, the VMWare brand will now likely be destroyed, and some people will get payed well. Most of the honest and hard-working, however, will likely be looking for jobs soon.
Don't mean to sound the end of VMWare, but this has probably been decided by actions already taken. That's what it sounds like to me from what I have been reading on BN and elsewhere.
Roy Schestowitz
2008-09-11 06:00:46