I'm surprised noone mentioned this cash dividend VMware paid about a year ago now as one of the possible issue we faced. The cash dividend was actually a huge sum like 11Billions mostly gone to DELL shareholders.
As the dividend wasn't really covered by real annual earnings the natural drop in price that happens when a company pays a dividend was never recovered.
The idea I have is that VMware was really an incredible profitable companies but very bad choices like: dividends, bad acquisitions, bad vision brought us to this conclusion.
At the moment there are a lot of companies with very few earnings which market capitalization is like 120Billions.