Let's see the company this time next year and if they haven't had a 50% growth rate, let's see if Maritz gets the boot as quickly as Ms. Greene did. (Somehow, I doubt the old boys club will have that happen.)

I remember a few years ago, Ransom Love, a dedicated Linux developer, led Caldera from a bunch of orphans who had been abandoned by Novell, to a substantial company that was beginning to land major accounts, including Pepsico chains (Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC), McDonalds, Burger King, and several other major franchises as well as numerous other large accounts for cash registers and other point of sale systems.

Yet, when he tried to obtain the SCO service department, to service the accounts that Caldera was winning (SCO had been supplying these franchises earlier), there were too many shares outstanding, and Ransom Love found himself on the short end of a proxy fight.

Ransom Love was replaced by Daryl McBride, whose main qualifications were the ability to sue the pants of his employers and the willingness to work for $30,000 per year and 1 million share of stock options at a strike price of about 75 cents/share.

McBride knew nothing about Linux, nothing about Unix, and very little about the history of either system, but he decided to sue IBM for $3 billion dollars based on his personal opinion that IBM had stolen SCO's intellectual property.

SCO made over 125 claims, and all but about 20 of them were dropped for lack of evidence, because that was all IBM asked the judge to drop. The remaining 20 claims were on intellectual property that IBM could prove they had owned long before they did any kind of business with Novell, even before they signed the AT&T contract.

But it was a brilliant "pump and dump" scheme, Daryl McBride, and treasurer, who was also an officer at Microsoft, had jacked the price from just under $1 per share to nearly 21 dollars a share and slowly sold their shares, getting an average price of around $14/share.

VMWare is another company who has created a very substantial business that has found it's way into almost every data center where either Windows or Linux is used, especially on Blade racks. VMWare is also becoming very popular on the desktop, where they have made it very easy to generate a Windows VMWare image using VMWare converter, which can be saved on an external USB drive, then the user can install Linux as the native operating system, then install VMWare player, and then install the Windows VM which can be played with VMWare player.

The VMWare player running on Linux, will actually make Windows run FASTER than it does in "native mode". Linux has better memory management, disk I/O buffering and space management, and better security. So not only do users get a better and faster Windows, they also get a Linux system on their laptop or desktop, which means more functionality.

Many major application vendors, including IBM, Oracle, Borland, SAP, and BEA are now shipping Linux VMWare images that are "ready to run" rather than trying have the user spend hours doing complex installations just to decide whether it's worth the effort.

Of course, this popularity on the laptop has quickly led to even wider acceptance in the server room, especially in IT centers where both Linux and Windows are running in the data center. A free "player" and quick "VM version of Windows" wins over a lot of Architects and administrators who can see, from their laptop performance, that VMWare isn't going to gobble up their server performance.

VMWare is based on technology which is remarkably similar to technology that IBM developed back in the 1960s and 1970s for it's VM/CMS and DOS/VS systems.

Microsoft has not been able to get control of server virtualization, and VMWare is now threatening Microsoft's control of the desktop. Furthermore, VMWare workstation has become a very popular way to generate VMWare "Appliances" that run on the laptop or desktop.

Microsoft was able to subvert Xen, helping Citrix orchestrate a takeover, then giving them the incentives to scuttle Linux as the "host" operating system and rewrite it so that the commercial versions would only allow Windows to be the primary OS and would not run Vista as a Client unless Vista was the host OS.

Meanwhile, there are several KVM and Virtualization components being put right into the Linux kernel which will fool Vista. Microsoft knows it can't control the proliferation of those new OSS vertualization schemes (or the OSS version of Xen).

So the solution is simple. Get EMC to buy VMWare, then spin it off into a separate company, then let some investor friendly to Microsoft buy up the outstanding stock, and combine with EMC to oust Diane Greene, who has made a fortune by supporting Linux (which is a key element of their success).

So now, all they have to do is let the shares crash a bit, the share-holders will hire a crackpot recommended by Microsoft out of desperation, and we'll see yet another round of groundless claims that Linux has somehow "stolen" code from VMWare, with the help of IBM.

IBM can drag the case out for 4-5 years, but meanwhile the Linux based Virtualization efforts will be hamstrung by fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

There will of course be that huge surge in stock price at the site of a $3 billion lawsuit, but by the time people realize that it was all a sham, the big money who sponsored the coup will be long gone, leaving stock-holders to face bankruptcy with not even the possibility of a bail-out.

The only problem, EMC could be caught in the middle, and could be held liable for the fraudulent lawsuit.

If high- flying VMware is drawing a bit of scrutiny and investors wondering if the anticiapted size of the virtualization market may have been just a wee bit bloated / hyped ... you gotta wonder if Citrix wishes it could turn back the clock on that XenSource acquisition and have their HALF BILLION back. Wowzas.