VMware stock market performance suffered a bad hit last Tuesday when the company announced its Q4 2007 financial results. Despite the remarkable growth VMware was unable to match financial analysts forecasts, which led to investors’ panic.
As result VMW lost almost 30 points on NYSE, moving from $83 to $54.87.
One week after the situation doesn’t seem much better, with an opening price set to $58.05, despite the release of its new VDI connection broker VMware Desktop Manager 2.0:
A common opinion is that this bad performance depends on the renewed threat of Microsoft, working to gain market control through its upcoming hypervisor Hyper-V and several major partnerships (with Citrix, with Novell, with Sun).
The more Microsoft unleashes its marketing war machine, the more VMW investors start to feel the competitive pressure, and any financial result under expectations is perceived as a first signal of the VMware failure.
The fact that Oracle CEO compares the company to Netscape or that Burton Group compares it to Novell (when it lost its battle against Microsoft) doesnt’ help.
It’s possible that VMW performance will not get much better until the final release of Microsoft Hyper-V: at that point the market’s answer to the product will clarify if VMware can maintain its market leader position for a while (until Hyper-V 2.0 at least).