If you took any notice of the following article when it came out last week, you missed out on a few more dollars of profit. Sorry! A couple of weeks ago, the reality roadshow from VMware hit the highways, (emphasis on high) and the virtualisation company's stock, originally priced at $24 became an unreal $29 prior to their debut on Wall Street today. With a couple of flicks of a real life trading button, the stock then hit nearly $56 and a new era in hard drive storage, hard drive storage millionaires and hard stomached speculators has been born.

The biggest news is that the company with software that can turn your single hard drive into a series of data stores (aka virtualization) will have a competitor next year.

The hot demand for virtualization software also has attracted the attention of Microsoft Corp., which has indicated that it plans to enter the market.

Ah, Redmond's photocopiers are hot in pursuit already.

An analyst said that VMware have the market pretty well locked up through 2008, which is what Sony thought about the threat of the XBox and then the Nintendo Wii, so what do analysts and conglomerates know!

In this day and age of equality, it should come as no surprise that a lady heads VMware, and her husband is an employee of hers. This would have been virtually unheard of a few years ago, when women's knowledge of computers was limited to a Casio calculator and the job of cleaning the keyboard of their husband and son's PC. Three cheers for emancipation and virtualization.

I look forward to installing VMware and storing The Pisstakers data in quadruplet on my new hard drive, just in case. (Just in case of what? 4 tsunamis or 4 last minute hurricanes? Sounds like a lot of hype all of a sudden. Quick, sell, sell sell.

Based on an article from serious minds at yahoo finance.