3 ms·

I could see them pulling a Microsoft with the three Es.

• hinkley 7y ago
  As someone pointed out to me recently, while waxing poetic about VMWare and K8s, Dell owns a big chunk of VMWare. Private Cloud buildout plays into Dell's interests, but if their execution is worse than even one Public Cloud provider, then they risk this becoming an exit strategy. You can make a lot of money off of being an exit strategy, and for quite some time. But when the evacuation is over you have nothing. Honestly if Dell does this well enough I could see them using some of IBM's old tricks. One in particular I'm thinking of is that IBM would overprovision the customer (installs are more expensive than dormant hardware). Fast forward to your next crunch time and you're oversubscribed, you call up IBM and they send you a piece of code to unlock the rest of the servers. No scheduling, no deliveries. If I'm running my own server room, it turns out having a bunch of hardware around I don't use is prohibitively expensive (in part because corporations use funny math and account for labor costs in weird ways). Which kinda bums me out because I used to get excited about ideas like running servers where it's cold to save huge amounts on electricity. But if I'm leasing hardware from Dell, then the math is simpler. Labor and travel time are the same color of money as the hardware. Installing a whole rack of servers and only leasing you a half or quarter rack at a time (and using some of the extras for hardware failure) might be more cost effective. And I'm sure IBM knew what they were doing. The immediacy of picking up a phone and having 'more hardware' today versus scheduling it three weeks out (and having the team decide to prioritize optimization work) must be more lucrative. If a little bit like drug dealing...