VMware Loses Chief Scientist
VMware continues to hemorrhage executives. The latest is Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, chief scientist and husband of co-founder and recently ousted CEO Diane Greene. The
New York Times reports that Rosenblum quit last night and will return to teaching at Stanford.
In addition to Greene and Rosenblum, VMware last week lost Richard Sarwal, the executive vice president in charge of research and development, who left for his old job at Oracle after staying around long enough for a cup of coffee. That was after Paul Chan, VP of product development, said he was quitting in October.
If you're keeping track at home, that's four major players. In fact, they'd be 1-4 in your lineup, with Greene batting cleanup. That's a huge amount of talent and vision to lose in a couple of months. It's times like this that employees start to ask themselves, and their co-workers, "Who's next?" I wouldn't want to be morale officer at VMware right now.
And could the timing be worse? Microsoft stole some of VMworld's thunder with its coincidentally timed (wink, wink) announcements yesterday of all the new products. Things just keep getting worse for new CEO Paul Maritz. Thus far he's handled all the crises with great aplomb, but how much more of a brain and leadership drain can the company handle? Maritz told the Times reporter, "Any time you have a company in transition, you have challenges."
You can say that again.
Posted by Keith Ward on 09/09/2008 at 12:48 PM