Open Source Blog

Who did Tucci bring in to replace Greene (who he believed lacked the experience to keep VMware on its growth trajectory)? Paul Maritz. Maritz's credentials? Errr, he was founder and CEO of that massive technology powerhouse, Pi Corporation.

Pi who? Well may you ask. Because Pi Corporation hadn't actually brought any products to market when it was acquired by -- you guessed it -- EMC.

Before it was bought, Pi Corporation had said it was "working on" some products. How big was Pi Corp? Check out the biographies page: there's only one entry -- you guessed right again -- Paul Maritz.

OK, so Maritz spent 14 years at Microsoft, and before that, five years at Intel. While he was at Microsoft he was called on to give testimony in the Department of Justice antitrust case. As part of Microsoft’s defence, Maritz made much of Linux’s threat to Microsoft, telling the judge that Microsoft was battling to defend itself not only against Linux on the server and desktop, but also against a host of open-source application products, ranging from sendmail to StarOffice.

He even said in his testimony that, contrary to popular opinion at that time, Linux isn't hard to install or use. In fact, he said, his college-age son downloaded Red Hat Linux in 30 minutes. 30 minutes!

Anyway, in terms of sitting in the CEO's hot-seat or taking a firm from one stage of its development to the next, he has less experience than Greene herself, who was founder of video streaming company Vxtreme (sold to Microsoft in 1997) before she co-founded and ran VMware. And she had formerly held technical leadership positions at Silicon Graphics, Tandem and Sybase.

Still, she's got nothing on the former CEO of Pi Corporation, right Joe?