People move around from job to job and company to company all the time.  In fact, these days it no longer seems common or fashionable for someone to begin and end their career with one company. But it's also a two-way street: There no longer seems to be that sense of loyalty between employer and employee that existed some 40+ years ago.

But with that said, for some reason when a co-founder or individual who helped start a company ends up leaving (on their own or forced out) the news always seems to raise a red flag.  There doesn't always have to have a juicy story attached to it, but it still tends to raise eyebrows and gets people talking.

In the case of VMware, believe it or not, it's been two years since what I'll call the company's "D-Day"... or put another way, it's been a whole two years since the VMware board of directors made its 2008 landmark decision to remove the company's co-founder Diane Greene from her seat of power as VMware's CEO after 10 years of service.

That departure came with a juicy story and raised eyebrows in the media and virtualization community  -- or at the very least, raised a lot of juicy questions as to the "why" of the matter.  But what makes Greene's departure even more noteworthy is she is just one of four co-founders who have left the company.  Five people started VMware back in 1998, and while the technology was considered cool and interesting, it certainly didn't have the following that it has today. Few thought the company would ever become a 900-pound gorilla.  I'm not even sure folks gave it much possibility of becoming a chimpanzee.  With only 20-30 people in the company at that time, and with only a workstation desktop-class virtualization platform to offer the market, VMware was very much a startup with little notion of becoming the billion-dollar company it is today.

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Read the rest of my InfoWorld article here.