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PAUL MARITZ

ORAL

HISTORY

COMPUTERWORLD HONORS PROGRAM

INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES

Transcript of a Video History Interview with

Paul Maritz

Chief Executive Officer

VMware

Recipient of the 2011 Morgan Stanley Leadership Award

for Global Commerce

Interviewer: Julia KingNational Correspondent

Computerworld, Inc.

Date: March 23, 2011

Location: VMware HQ

Palo Alto, California



Today is March 23, 2011 and we‟re interviewing Paul Maritz, Chief ExecutiveOfficer of VMware. Paul is the 2011 recipient of the Morgan Stanley Leadership

Award for Global Commerce. This interview is taking place at VMware

Headquarters in Palo Alto, California, and is made possible by Morgan Stanley and

the Computerworld Honors Program.

The interviewer is Julia King, National Correspondent of Computerworld.

The Honors program was established in 1988 to seek out, honor, and preserve the

history of the global information technology revolution. It was founded by Patrick McGovern of International Data Group, and Roger Kennedy of the Smithsonian

Institution‟s National Museum of American History. It is now the world‟s largest ITawards program.

This oral history is being recorded for distribution to more than 350 national

archives, museums, universities and research institutions in more than fifty countrieson six continents around the world, and program‟s archives on-line.

Without objection, the complete video, audio and transcripts of this interview will

become part of these international scholarly research collections and made available

to the public on the web.

This discussion, however, is private and should any participant wish to withhold

from the public record any part of these sessions, this request will be honored. Allpresent here are honor-bound to respect this, and by remaining here, they accept the

personal, professional and legal responsibility to abide by this agreement.

With no objections being heard, we will proceed.

Paul Maritz: Agreed.

Julia King: You are the 2011 recipient of the Morgan Stanley Leadership Award

for Global Commerce, a very prestigious award, and the purpose of this interview is

to find out how you went from a cattle ranch in Rhodesia to really the forefront of

this computing revolution. So why don‟t we start at the beginning, and tell me aboutgrowing up on a cattle ranch in Rhodesia.

PM: I grew up a barefoot boy on a 30,000 acre cattle ranch in what was thenRhodesia and is now Zimbabwe. In many ways it was a great privilege because it

was a very full childhood. On the other hand, we didn‟t have many of the things thatother kids do. We literally didn‟t have electricity in our house until I was about 10

years old, but my parents were both well-educated and curious people, and theypassed that on. And I developed as a young boy, a passion for all things mechanical,

which then got translated into an interest in computing.





JK: Are there experiences early on that helped you develop these skills to really

look into the future and skate to where the puck is going to be, as they say?

PM: I started my working career here in Silicon Valley at Intel, which was very

influential on me. That was Intel in its heyday when it was still being run by Andy

Grove, and Gordon Moore, and Les Vadez, and it was a very intellectuallychallenging and honest environment. It was an environment where people were

encouraged to speak their minds. It was exhilarating for me as I was 26 years old at

the time. To go into a meeting with legends like Andy Grove and Gordon Moore,and if you spoke, you were treated with absolute equality. You had as much right to

speak as anybody else. Now, by the same token if you said something stupid, they

felt just as free to strike you down. But there was none of this hierarchy in that itwas really, „How do we get the best out of everybody? And how do we run a

meritocracy? And how do we focus on the issues and not on people?‟ So those first5 years of my working career at Intel were very influential on me, and I tried to keep

some of the things I learned there going in subsequent opportunities. I have had that

focus on the issues, meritocracy, openness to ideas and input. So it was a greatprivilege to be there in the 1980s.

JK: Did you have a specific or particular mentor at Intel?

PM: Yes, I did actually. I had one mentor in my life who actually brought me to the

United States and brought me to Intel, and then actually connected me to Microsoft.He was a gentleman by the name of Jim Harris. I did my undergraduate education in

South Africa, and I wanted to work in the computing industry. So at the end of 1977

I literally packed a backpack, and since my mother is British, I had the automaticright to live and work in England. So in January of 1978 I showed up in London,

and it‟s sort of the off-season for recruiting so I just went and knocked on doors. I

knocked on IBM‟s door, and they weren‟t interested. And eventually I knocked on a

door in South London, for a company some of us remember, called Burroughs. Andthey took me in to meet this very stuffy English personnel manager. He did the

initial interview with me, and I was sort of dreading this. It was a gray winter day in

London, and I said, “Oh my God, this is not going to be good.” But then he took mein to meet the hiring manager, and he took me into this open-plan office, which in

1978 was unusual to have an open-plan office. And there was this gentleman sitting

in the back of this open- plan office with his feet up on his desk, and I‟ll alwaysremember this, he was wearing carpet slippers. And as I walked into the room, I

overheard him boom, “That guy is so low he could fit underneath a whale turd on the bottom of the ocean.” (Laughter) I thought, “this is a place I could work!”





And one of the counsels I give to folks now as they move along in their careers is

that you really have to force yourself to realize that every time you go up by a factorof 10, every time you go from being an individual contributor to managing 10

people, how you make your contribution, and how you get your feedback and

satisfaction has to change. That if you get your satisfaction when you‟re managing

10 people the same way as how you‟re getting it when you‟re managing 1 person,yourself basically, it‟s going to be a problem. And similarly when you move frommanaging 10 people to 100, and when you manage from moving from 100 to 1,000.

At each of those junctures, you have to be very cognizant and say, „the contribution Iam going to make and the way I am going to get rewarded for making that

contribution, and the feedback I‟m going to get is going to change.‟ And a lot of

people never let go of wanting to get their satisfaction and feedback the way they got

it before. A lot of times I say to people, “Some times we all have a natural point

along those powers of 10, where we‟re actually happiest. And sometimes it‟s okayto stay there. You‟re not going to be any happier by trying to go further than that,

unless you can really say to yourself, „I‟m going to let go of how things are done at

that level and move to a different way of measuring myself and rewarding myself,not in a financial sense, but in terms of how you get your feedback and

satisfaction.‟”

JK: You seemed to have focused much of your career on building tools and

eventually platforms, even here at VMware, on which others can build applications

and businesses, which requires great vision and it takes a lot of vision to go fromplatform to a new business. Where did that come from? How did you develop this

vision?

PM: You know as I said earlier, I think when I had early training working at Intel,

when they realized that the microprocessor was going to be a seminal technology,

and it was going to have very long legs, and was going to effect many parts of the

technology world, and the world in general, I enjoyed listening to how they wouldthink. They had a process that they called SLRP, which stood for Strategic Long

Range Plans, pronounced “slurp.” Every area, every business unit was expected to

present a SLRP to the executive committee, and it taught me a lot about how toproject into the future and how things occurred. It also taught me a lot about the

futility of doing that because things really work out exactly the way that you think

they‟re going to work out. But it‟s important to set a direction and then measureoften to make sure that the assumptions you made still hold true, and be able to

course correct. And I think those successful people in organizations are those that

are able to both set a direction and then discipline themselves to get constant

feedback so that they can course correct. Because it‟s really those organizations thatare able to course correct that really succeed.



JK: What do you consider your greatest strength, and how have you best

leveraged it so far in your career?

PM: You should probably ask other people that question as to what my greatest

strength is. I can tell you what my greatest weaknesses are. I think I have an

understanding and passion for technology, and I‟m able to fairly quickly understandideas that other people have and distill the gist out of those ideas and help focus

them. So I think a lot of the value that I‟ve added along my career is really being

able to quickly understand insights that other people have, distill them down to theirassets, and then connect the dots. And I think that‟s one of the contributions that Ican make going along.

JK: And what do you consider your greatest weakness? You brought it up.

PM: I hate confrontation. I am a coward [laughter]. I have a very hard time saying

„no‟ to people. It‟s the sort of thing I realize I need a complement for. One of the

things I‟ve learned along the way is that nobody is the perfect leader. None of ushave what it takes to be the perfect leader. And often one of the standard pieces of

wisdom I try to bring to the conversation is to say that any successful teamorganization really has four characters involved. You have a visionary - someone

who knows where you‟re supposed to go. You have a manager who makes sure thateverybody knows their part in that journey and takes care of the personal and

interpersonal issues. You need to have a champion of the customer, because often

the visionary can‟t see the things that the way that customers will see them. Youneed to make that connection between what customers want and where we‟re going.

Then lastly you need the enforcer. You need the person who says, “Look we‟vedebated this long enough, and all you guys need to get out of the kitchen now

because we need to start cooking.”

You never get all four characteristics in the same person. Really good leadership is

where people complement each other. And that‟s what I saw at Intel for instance,where Gordon Moore was the visionary. Andy Grove was the manager. Les Vadasz

was the enforcer. Great teams exist where those individuals respect each other andknow that at points along the journey they need to assert themselves, and equally

important at what point of the journey they need to get out of the way and let the

other person do their job.



JK: While we are on the topic of leadership, I‟m curious of your opinion as to

whether it is something that is learned, or is it innate? And also, have the qualities of a good leader needed to change or evolve throughout the course of this computing

revolution?

PM: I wish I knew the answer to the question whether leadership is innate orwhether it‟s learned. This is the old „nature versus nurture‟ debate and I think thereality is probably a bit of both. You know, to be a good leader you need self-

confidence with a small “s” and a small “c.” In other words you need the self -confidence to both set a direction and take feedback, and have the courage to course

correct without fearing that you‟ll lose face in doing so.

The only thing that I try and impart is that people become great in organizations that

are fundamentally learning organizations, and learning‟s not a comfortable business.You have to go out of your way to expose yourself to feedback and contrary

opinions, and that is something that I believe you can learn to do. You can try and

structure your tasks so that at regular intervals you‟re explicitly asking for feedback.And making sure that that feedback is being heard and disposed of one way or

another, either by accepting it, or explicitly rejecting it, but not just letting it sitaround there. A lot of the changes in software engineering methodology, if you look

at things like Agile for example, center around how do we get feedback earlier and

more regularly? So it‟s not all about working on things where you go on a journey

for three years and you only find out at the end of three years whether you got itright or not. How do we break it up into subtasks, explicitly, so we get meaningful

feedback earlier in the cycle?

JK: Microsoft has certainly been a big part of your career. What do you consider

your greatest contribution during your years at Microsoft?

PM: You know in some ways I think I was the guy who sort of said, “you know

after we‟ve mathematically proven that all these ideas are stupid, which of these

stupid ideas are we actually going to do, because we‟re going to have to do one of

them?” I was able to sort of provide a bridge between the incredible intellect of BillGates and the drive of Steve Ballmer. Bill is a great strategic thinker, Steve a great

tactician. And somebody needed to glue that into a development organization and

take enough of the strategy and enough of the tactics and make sure that we actuallydid something. That was really my role there.



JK: Well you certainly became very visible at Microsoft and in the world really

during the browser wars of the „90s and ultimately at the Microsoft anti-trust trial.That had to be an enormous emotional experience, especially for someone who

doesn‟t necessarily enjoy confrontation. What personal strengths and qualities did

you need to draw on most during that period? And what was most difficult during

that period, and what were some of your lessons learned during that period?

PM: That was, I think, a very trying period for Microsoft and certainly for those of

us on the management team. I think the fundamental learning that I had then is thatup until then we had narrowly viewed ourselves in the technology space. And then

we had crossed over into the public space where it was no longer just about purely

technical issues. At that point you get to a certain size and you have to realize

you‟re operating in a space where other factors are operating and you need to learn adifferent set of skills and take different advice. Our mistake at that point was not to

go to people who had lived through this before and say, “Look, this is a battle you

can‟t win.” We thought we were playing baseball but in reality we were playing

football. So we did what we thought were the right things to do when you‟re playingbaseball, but found ourselves in a football pitch. We should have had counsel from

somebody wise at that point in time to say, “You‟ve moved into a different space.You have to handle this differently. You have to respond to the issues differently.”

What‟s really going on here is that you‟ve become a big company and people areconcerned about this. This is not about a technical issue of tying the browser to the

operating system. It‟s about how you will conduct yourself when you‟ve reached a

certain point where you‟re now a large actor on the public stage, and people expectyou to behave differently when you‟re doing that.

That was a tough learning experience because we passionately believed that we were

technically right, and we got into an arena where it became clearer and clearer every

day that this was not a technical discussion that was going on. It was very

frustrating. But at the end of the day we got through it, but it certainly was a long journey. I think it was as recently as two years ago that I was deposed for the final

time out of that suit, because I think there were around 30-million pieces of email

produced as part of that. And that was one of the big learnings of the industry,

which was „beware of email.‟ It turned out that there was a whole industry of

lawyers that emerged after the government case, where all they did was troll through

those emails looking for more and more bizarre theories to try and hold Microsoft upat the pass. So it was a long journey.

JK: I‟m very interested too in your post-Microsoft life, obviously, and where did

you put your energy in between leaving Microsoft and founding Pii, which was laterpurchased by EMC? I am especially interested in your philanthropic work, and

technology‟s role in that work. Why do you feel it‟s so important to give back?

PM: Well starting with why I think it‟s so important to give back, I feel like I‟vebeen incredibly privileged in my life. One of the things that I say to the folks here at

VMware is that every one of us should be very cognizant of the fact that we won the



lottery of life. That there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of other people in

the world who are equally qualified in terms of intellectual ability and emotionalability to do what we do, but they‟re not here basically just through a quirk of fate.To all of us, much has been given, and to whom much is given, much is expected. I

think there‟s that aspect, and the other aspect is that I think you can learn a lot in

getting out of the environment we are in and interacting with different people.

I got involved through a series of events in the micro finance industry. We were

talking earlier about the necessity to do strategic planning, make strategic bets,etcetera, and how we view that as a giant chess game that we play. A couple of

years ago I went to visit a micro finance organization in India and they operate on

the so-called „classic micro finance model‟ where groups of women come together,stand surety for each other and take out loans. It‟s a very hands-on high-touch

process. There‟s a weekly meeting where everyone comes together to discuss their progress, people make payments, get new disbursements, etcetera. And it happens

early in the day because these are all working women. I went there sort of expecting

this to be a “30 village women getting together and the first thing they do is youknow, chat and discuss and the rest of it,” and it was the most serious meeting I have

ever been to in my life. These women were there at 6:30 in the morning. They hadto work the rest of the day. This was a matter of life and death for them, whether

they could be successful in their endeavors literally meant whether their children

would eat or not. And all of a sudden I got a whole different perspective on what it

really means to be running a strategic business. Our decisions are not going to effectwhether our children eat tomorrow or not. And when you come back from that

experience, you look at things differently. It gives you a different perspective of

what‟s going on, and just the incredible privilege we have in our industry.

JK: How has that played out in how you run VMware?

PM: You know, trying to effect culture in general is a hard thing to do becauseculture comes bottoms up. Culture is not inculcated top-down. Somebody reminded

me that Enron had their slogans of integrity, respect, honor, chiseled in stone above

their door. Things need to come bottoms-up. Culture is the sum of small things, not

big things. So I‟ve tried to create the potential here for a culture of service and

learning to emerge.



So one of the things we‟ve done to try and foster that is to give our employees an

additional week every year of paid time off to do service. We call that servicelearning, because we think as important as the service they can do, equally important

is the learning they will have by doing that service. So we call it our service learning

program. We just started. It‟s been going for about 9 months now here in the US

and we‟re extending it internationally as well, and I am very interested to see whatwill happen as a result. I am hoping we will see a lot of initiatives come bottom-up.

We do it on an honor basis. It‟s not like you‟ve got to only work in certain approved

programs or whatever. I don‟t want this to be something that you know you can‟t

get promoted unless you‟ve done your quota of service kind of a deal. This reallyhas to be something that comes from the bottom.

JK: You‟re credited with originating the term, “Eating your own dog food.” Or,

“dogfooding.” Tell me about that?

PM: Yes, that is probably, unfortunately, my lasting contribution to the industry. It

started actually with the mentor I mentioned earlier, Jim Harris. He was a big andcolorful character, and he loved to sit in the back of the room during reviews of

products and engineering tasks. And when everyone had finished all their geek

speak he would kind of lean back and boom out, “Yes, but will the dogs eat the dog

food?” In other words, does it matter to the customer at all? So in the early days of

Microsoft we had formed a networking business unit to compete with Novell.

Novell was king of the hill in networking. I had this business unit and we had no

customers so we couldn‟t do a beta test because there were no customers to beta test

our networking software. So I sent an email to Brian Valentine who was the test

manager at the time. Brian now runs all of infrastructure for Amazon. I said,

“Brian, there is only one solution. We‟re going to have to eat our own dog food.” In

other words we‟re going to have to use the product ourselves in order to test it. Sohe set up a test server called “//dogfood,” and all of us had to use the dog food server

as our network server. And somehow it caught on from there and became a verbinside Microsoft, and then it spread from there into the industry.

JK: How do you define innovation? You talked about culture coming from thebottom up. Is it the same with innovation, or where do you think it comes from?

PM: Yes, it does come from the bottom-up. You can‟t mandate innovation. Itreally is trying to create that space where people can bubble ideas up and then take

those ideas and put them through a process where you can actually fashion them, and

encourage them to become more related to what could really have an impact in the

marketplace. And that is an aspect of culture again, which unfortunately you can‟t

mandate. You‟ve got to have the right people, and you‟ve got to be prepared totolerate a little bit of chaos. As somebody said, „you‟ll never get a pearl unless youlet a bit of sand into the oyster,‟ and that‟s very true.



Organizations have inertia. They tend to want to continue doing what they are

already good at doing. They‟re risk averse and you‟ve got to tolerate those people in

the organization who are the particles of sand in the oyster. You can‟t put so much

sand into the oyster that you lacerate everything and it dies. But part of a manager‟s job is to provide a little bit of protection, because it‟s often from those particles of

sand that you will get feedback that you would not otherwise have gotten, and thatwill take you on a different course.

JK: Who are some of the innovators that you admire?

PM: The ones I admire are probably not well known to the industry. I had the great

pleasure recently at our annual sales kick off event in recognizing some unsungheroes. There is a great example here at VMware. One of our signature features at

VMware is this thing called vMotion that essentially allows you to take a running

operating system image and in real time move it from one physical machine to the

other without missing a beat along the way. And it looks like magic when you see it

first done. This is the kind of thing that used to take extraordinarily expensivehardware to do, and now we do it routinely with off-the-shelf hardware. And that

was initially kicked off by a couple of guys here inside VMware in the early days,and sort of then just put on the shelf. And we had a guy who was literally straight

out of college come in and he sort of found this thing, and without explicitly being

told to do so, he picked it up and started really refining it and making it effective.

People like to think he must have had a whole huge army on this feature, but for 7

years it‟s been one young guy. He‟s been this lone face behind the big image. Andit‟s those kinds of people who really make a difference.

Another example, which probably is more interesting from a historical perspective,

is what really made Windows successful at Microsoft. Windows came out actually

in 1985, and really went nowhere because it couldn‟t exploit the changes in the

hardware. It was designed initially for the 80-86 generation of microprocessors andthey were not powerful enough to power it. It really needed the 286 and 386

generation of processors to make it work. But everyone thought we were going to

have to completely rework it and reengineer it. A young engineer named DavidWyse suddenly had an insight one day, whereby with some clever but minor amount

of work could get Windows to take advantage of the new generation of 286 and 386

hardware, which completely transformed Windows. Whereas before then we werehaving to rely on OS2 and IBM, and that was not going well because somehow

Microsoft and IBM managed to not the best out of each other. All of a sudden there

was this alternative and it literally took Microsoft and the whole industry on a

different trajectory all because of one guy right at the bottom of the organization

who said, “Hey what if?” He wasn‟t following the company dogma. The companydogma was to go OS2.



JK: What do you consider your strength? Is it being an innovator, recognizing

innovation, or creating a climate where innovation can thrive?

PM: I think it‟s more of the latter, of being able to recognize innovation, creating aclimate for it. I myself unfortunately am not an innovator or guru. I can just see it

when it happens.

JK: Can you talk about the implications virtualization has for greener computing

and how this has played out at VMware?

PM: Well virtualization is all about using hardware more efficiently, and as such

you get a big green dividend from that because what it enables is companies to, in anon-disruptive, evolutionary way, go from having this sprawl of X-86 based servers,

most of which are running at 5, 10, 15% of their capacity, and that‟s something thatironically I and others helped to create that problem at Microsoft, and now I‟m on

the other side of trying to redeem it. But by reducing the number of servers you cut

down the amount of floor space, the amount of power, the amount of airconditioning, etcetera. So, funny story is a year or two back we helped Mayor

Bloomberg meet his green targets for New York City. He had set certain targets to

cap and lower New York‟s production of carbon. Initially they were hoping to do it

all by encouraging ride sharing and public transport, and of course it didn‟t quitework out that way. Then somebody pointed out that the City of New York had

virtualized the city‟s data centers and dramatically reduced the number of servers,and therefore the amount of power they were using, and therefore the amount of

carbon they were emitting. So at the last moment they were able to claim victory.

JK: Talk about the explosion in mobile computing and this proliferation of

consumer devices – how do these forces impact legacy-computing infrastructures?

PM: Well, I think what‟s really profound about mobile is not only the fact that youcan get access to information wherever you are, increasingly in the globe, in real

time. But we‟re finally seeing the beginning of the end of the PC era. This is kind

of something that is bitter sweet for me, having spent 20 years of my life, if youcount the time at Intel, working on PC and PC related technologies, Windows Office

etcetera. And during the PC era we were really about automating pieces of paper. In

other words, what the PC industry did was take what we‟d previously done bywriting things down on paper and automating it. We had the word processor, the

spreadsheet, the presentation package, etcetera.



So that whole era was really about automating documents. What‟s emerging now is

actually the post document world. In other words, people no longer think of howthey consume and share information in the context of a document. They think of it

in different metaphors, in terms of threads of email, in terms of interactions on a

Facebook wall, etcetera. And those are underpinned increasingly by different device

form factors. So people are not only shifting how they conceptualize information, but there‟s also fundamental change in terms of the underlying device form factor that will rely on that. So what I see happening here is really two things, not only the

emergence of true mobility and the ability to access information anywhere, anytime,

but we‟re actually seeing the post-document world, which will have a very dramatic

impact on everything that happens.

JK: Mobility and consumer devices have all but erased boundaries between

traditional work life and non-work life. What do you think about this, and what are

the implications for technology and society overall going forward as all of this melts

together?

PM: It‟s funny because I was actually talking to Bill Gates about two months ago

and one of the things I sad to him, I said, “Look Bill, it‟s not for nothing that

infrastructure companies are run by people in their 40‟s and 50‟s.” Because youtend to be passionate about what you found interesting and cool when you were 20

or 21 years old. And when Bill, I and others were 21 years old, we found compilers

and operating systems and programming languages cool, and all of our life has been

about reuse tools which enable other things to happen. It‟s not for nothing that

search companies are run by people in their 30s and early 40s now, because that was

cool 10 or 12 years ago when Larry and Sergei were at Stanford. And it‟s not for nothing that social networking companies are run by people in their 20s and 30s.

And you have to be very aware of that, because it limits your ability to really be able

to instinctively understand what‟s going on down there.

I can go into a discussion about computing infrastructure and instinctively

understand what‟s going on. I can understand and project the implications. You ask

me about social networking, I‟m the last person in the world you should ask. So Ican see some of these broad trends like the emergence of the post document world,

but how that‟s really going to affect us or infect us, that may be the better word

there, is very interesting, but I don‟t think we quite know that. There are some

things I think that are going to be very different, which is that we‟re going to movefrom a world that was very device centric - in other words, all of your life and

information was wrapped up in a particular device – to a world where we‟re going to

be characterized by a body of digital information that lives the entire duration of our

lives. And that can‟t belong to any one device. It‟s an interesting question of whodoes it belong to? Is it going to belong to Facebook? Does Facebook become the

keepers of all our information over time, because that‟s where it currently lives? I

think this is a really important question that society needs to figure out.



JK: You might not know precisely where it goes, but what are your hopes for the

future of this ongoing computing revolution, and how it effects and betters the worldsociety?

PM: The thing I think it has done is, if you just take my history and what I said

earlier, that I felt like I lived on the edge of the known universe and somewhere, wayover there, over the horizon all the interesting stuff is happening. That is radically

changed now for a large segment; not all, but a large segment of the world‟s

population. If you go to India or to Ghana or to Kenya, there are young people there

who feel very connected with what‟s happening in the world. Their ability to notonly see but participate in what‟s going on in the world has been dramatically

altered, and that‟s one of the hopeful things that I see. When I travel now and meet

with young people, they don‟t necessarily feel like the fix is in, and they‟ve beenautomatically excluded, and the only way they can participate is to literally forklift

themselves half way around the world. I think the technology revolution has enabled

them to participate in ways that were not previously possible. How to translate that

into higher living standards is still a challenge ahead of us, but the potential is there.

JK: This is my last question. You really have had a front row seat on some of themost critical turning points in computing technology history at Microsoft and now at

VMware. How would you like your role in this ongoing computing revolution to be

remembered?

PM: You know the thing I think about is not how I want to be remembered. I think

a lot about how does the organization that we‟re part of want to be remembered?

And this is something I discuss inside VMware. Let‟s assume that we‟re going to be

one of the major participants in the cloud era. It‟s not only getting there, but it‟s

how we want to be remembered when we‟ve gone there. Do we want to beremembered as a company that kind of screwed our competitors to the wall? No,

that‟s not what we want. I want us to be remembered as a company that at the end of

that journey, people say we gave more than we took. And you‟ve got to bethoughtful about that. And it isn‟t the result of big initiatives, it‟s a result of what we

do every day. And it‟s a lot harder to walk the walk than it is to talk the talk.

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