Best of the blogs: Fresh from a wildly successful IPO that landed more than $1 billion, virtualization’s golden boy VMware is looking to grow. “With such a large infusion of cash on hand, the company is now able to go after the very talent that has been, for the most part, monopolized in the area by Google,” David Marshall relates in this Virtualization Report post. “There are easily some 500+ jobs just waiting to be filled in the Palo Alto area at VMware. And as a throwback to the 90s, these jobs are rumored to be paying a starting salary of $130-160k with stock options at a current strike price of around $66.” The news beat: Turkish police arrest a Ukrainian national allegedly involved in the TKX data theft. Google’s Blogger service is struck by an outage and causing problems for users trying to edit, publish or access the blogs. Ingres injects its Icebreaker appliance with JasperSoft’s open source BI suite. And France says it is ready to break the European patents obstacle, a move which could reinvigorate efforts to create a single European patent. Quoteworthy: “If the people who work for you are afraid of you, they’ll tell you what they think you want to hear, not what you need to hear. That makes you worse than ignorant — it makes you misinformed. Leaders who are misinformed make bad decisions for reasons that I trust don’t require additional information. As a leader, the definition of your job is to produce results through the efforts of those who work for you. Leaders who yell, throw things, and intimidate end up having second-raters working for them, because first-rate employees have no reason to put up with that sort of treatment. They don’t have to.” — Bob Lewis, Defending tough CEOs. Notes from the field: Never one to be timid, Robert X. Cringely calls Hewlett-Packard’s support cross-eyed and brainless after a Kafkaesque experience. “I got transferred 12 times in 90 minutes,” Cringe recounts. “Every time the tech figured out I was calling about a UPS and not a computer, I was booted halfway ’round the globe to another support queue. I bounced from desktop support to notebooks to servers to pre-sales and back.” Cringe points out, by the by, that he’s struggled through his share of support nightmares but a recent call to HP rival Lenovo left him understanding that “it is indeed possible to deliver good service, it you make it a priority.” Software Development