Its all over the news wire, so you've probably caught this info already elsewhere. But, I did just get off the horn with an insider buddy of mine with some added information. According to some of the digging done by my source, although the timing of the firing seems strange -- it was done essentially during Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference -- there doesn't appear to be any linkages between the two.

As mentioned in Keith Ward's (from Virtualization Review) excellent analysis here, I think VMware's been experiencing a positioning problem that gets suddenly more tenuous with the release of Hyper-V:

It should be a very interesting earnings call on July 22, when Maritz will talk with journalists and analysts for the first time as president of VMware. I wouldn't be surprised if he announces price cuts across the board for VMware products, as that is the chief complaint about VMware.

As I've already mentioned in my post here, VMware's excessive hypervisor price is in need of coming down with the market pressure Microsoft is bringing to bear. My advice in that post that's worth repeating is to be careful with any virtualization purchases over the next 12-24 months. You might find the end of this phase in the game with some very different pricing structures.