"...Redmond's developer outreach in the glory days of the 1990s..."

Leave aside the renaming of OCX et al. to ActiveX. MS' developer support in the '90s was pretty brilliant. My copy of MSDN was a treasured resource. Good on the ex-MS fellow.

Microsoft did a great job at moving all those development tools at billions in losses to eliminate cross platform tool vendors like Watcom and Borland. At one time even Novell was building a cross platform tool cache but with Microsoft effectively dumping their wares on the market, profits and income sagged for all the other tool vendors.

So it looks like a good job but in reality, does VMware have the kind of financial power and distribution that Microsoft had/has to allow him to do the same at EMC? I doubt it.