One of the most diabolically clever things that EMC, venerable storage maker and darling of the Dot Com Boom, ever did was swoop in and buy VMware back in December 2003 as the server virtualization transition in the datacenter and the resulting cloud boom were just set to explode.
VMware was preparing to go public, with much fanfare, in the wake of the Dot Com bust, which was nearly three years old at that point, to raise heaven only knows how much money. EMC swooped in with $635 million in cash – an offer that co-founders and spouses Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum could not refuse. This may seem like a pittance for a company that only had two rounds of funding for $25 million and was largely funded by its founders and employees, btu that was a lot of money way back then. Three years later, as EMC was prepping to take VMware public, it sold a $150 million chunk of VMware, and when EMC did finally take VMware public in the summer of 2007, it ended up with a…
