Diane Greene No Longer at VMware

It’s been a week since Diane Greene’s abrupt departure from VMware. From my position on the fringes of the ‘inside’, the news was a shocker for every one. Mostly it was shocking for how it was done, not for it being done at all. People have been expecting her to be replaced by some one more ‘experienced’ for a while now, albeit in a more amiable fashion.

I personally like Diane, think it’s unfair, and am sad to see her go. I like the idea of a woman CEO, an engineer’s CEO, and a founder CEO all wrapped up in one - and was rooting for her to keep leading the company into competition with Microsoft. I even secretly enjoy her awkward public speaking skills - which always made me chuckle at the absurdity of the situation. She spoke to us at MIT last semester - during the Q&A session, she kept on interrupting a student who was in the middle of asking a question because new things popped into her head on a previous train of thought. This happened at least 3 times before he was able to finish his sentence. Poor guy - he must have prepped that question in his head many times only to have Diane ruin the moment for him.

During that same class session, some one raised the question of her relationship with Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC. At least back then she was politically savvy enough to say Tucci and her are cool and he’s leaving VMware alone to do its thing i.e. she told us nothing about the real situation. Now, it looks like some thing was brewing all along -

Fair or not, given EMC’s background, when a female CEO gets canned from the wildly successful company she founded and helped steer to its “unsatisfactory” 49% growth, and her “inexperience” and “lack of execution” are cited as the reasons, the tongues are going to wag.

In the end, she’s done a fantastic job. So much of the business-leader image is a smooth-talking MAN in a suit; but here she was kicking ass for years. I still remember how impressed I was when I first used the VMware desktop product at FactSet to reproduce some annoying Adobe Acrobat plug-in bugs. It’s awesome.