But I don't think you have to be a genius to figure it out, given the brick wall that's careening toward VMware as it toodles along at on own comfortable course.

First, it has nothing to do with the upcoming earnings announcement Wall Street analysts call "disappointing" following a warning that VMware won't quite hit the fifty-percent profit target it had posted. It also won't match the 69 percent revenue increase it posted for the first fiscal quarter of this year.

If Diane Green deserves to get fired for that level of growth and profit, most other CEOs, including EMC's Joe Tucci, deserve to be kidnapped and beaten by thugs. I'm not saying they don't, of course, just that they are praised lavishly for results that pale in comparison to Greene's.

And it's not entirely to avoid founder's syndrome.

True, Greene did found the company—with her husband Mendel Rosenblum—in 1998 and steered it to astonishing success, an enriching buyout and helped lead a developing revolution in the tech industry. Founders with that kind of background are often pushed out after their own pride and tunnel vision prevent them from seeing the new direction the company has to take.

Greene shows few signs of that. VMware did far more than any other company to develop and popularize virtualization and to advance the management of virtual servers beyond simple consolidation and administration. VMware execs and the company as a whole do tend to focus too much on their own hypervisor and on their technical superiority over Microsoft's virtualization products, but not to the extent of crippling the company.

If they stuck with just butting heads with Microsoft, it would certainly have crippled VMware eventually. Microsoft does not butt heads, it tries to smother them. Or, if it's competing over a technology that fits so neatly and effectively into the operating system as virtualization does, it simply crushes them. But it's not clear that VMware would have fallen into that trap, either.

And it's probably not even because of the tensions that reportedly existed between Greene's management team and that of Tucci at EMC which owns 85 percent of VMware's stock and was destined to win that scrap eventually.

All those things probably contributed, especially management tensions that probably arose as disagreements over how best to compete with Microsoft.