Still, everything was not rosy. Every quarter was tough, and the competitive and the technology landscapes changed rapidly. A technology called virtualization was taking the market by storm and changing the way customers thought about automating their environments. In fact, it looked to me like virtualization might be the technological breakthrough that finally enabled the cloud computing business model to work. Beyond that, being a public company was still never going to get easy. At one point, a shareholder activist named Rachel Hyman decided that my ego was out of control, and she demanded
...more
