According to NYTimes, VMWare is on a collision course with Microsoft. Although Microsoft will fight this battle for a long long time, the battle is probably already over in virtualization and VMWare is the winner. In some ways, the times could not be worse for Microsoft with a whole host of competitors in its various markets one upping them- SOHO (Google Apps, Intuit), On-Demand (Salesforce, NetSuite), Web2.0 (Google), Web platform (Amazon, Google).
VMWare appears poised to be one of the hottest IPOs of the year. EMC’s market capitalization of $30+ billion has already gone up by $10 billion over the last 6 months, and the upcoming IPO may make EMC shareholders and VMWare employees and shareholders very happy.
Do you think Microsoft will have to start acquiring companies to buy growth? Or does it still have some multi-billion dollar eggs ready to hatch?