Where is VMware's Share Price Going?

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rynardtspies: @Twickersmatt Just getting to grips with the products. Will give you a shout if we get stuck. Thanks! 21 hours ago from TweetDeck in reply to Twickersmatt

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Thursday, 13 November 2008 10:36

So, in less than a year, VMware has gone from a strong fast growing public offering "to a company whose slowing growth and plummeting shares led to the ouster of its former CEO and co-founder Diane Greene." I remember just shortly after VMware listed on the NYSE, I bought some shares in VMW at around $70 per share. Shortly after that the stock went on a rally and turned at around $125 per share. Back then I thought that this is going to get good, but as the shares rose to $125 I realised that it would not be wise to buy more at such a high share price.

However, as fast as the share price went up, it came down. Lucky for me, I sold all my VMware shares at around $113 per share, so I still made some good profit in a very short period. Just after I sold my shares, the stock went on to crush down to around $70 again. It got even worse and dropped to around $50. Yeah sure, it went up a couple of times, but in the long run it went down more than up and that's when Dianne Greene got the sack! Surprise or not, but after she left the stock slumped even more to $35. On 12 Nov, the stock took another drop by $1.22 or 5% to $22. Back at the $125 mark, a $1.22 drop is not much, but at the $24 mark it does matter a lot.

Let's just hope that the new CEO, Paul Maritz can pull something back with the mounting battle over cloud computing. At the moment the computing power shift is moving towards tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon. VMware needs to get it right if they want to be a player in the cloud computing league.

Call it lucky or not, but I'm just glad I sold off my stake in VMware at the best of times. I'm no stock broker so don't ask me where it's going but who knows, maybe a year from now they'll be back on the rise. Time will tell.