The son of a former Zimbabwean farmer, Maritz, who in the 1980s and 1990s served as one of Bill Gates’s top executives at Microsoft, has been appointed CEO of VMware, one of Silicon Valley’s hottest tech companies.
The University of Cape Town computer science graduate and Hilton College old boy was in SA this week on VMware business. He admits he misses Southern Africa, though he emigrated in 1977 to seek a career in hi-tech. After a brief stint in the UK, he moved to California to take a job at chipmaker Intel. “Through Intel I met these two crazy guys in Seattle, Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, and, in 1986, right after it had gone public, I joined Microsoft,” he says. “I remember thinking that the ride was already over. But, as it turns out, I was literally involved in the birth of the industry.”
Read the full story here.
