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I continue to blame both he and Michael Dell for the demise of VMware. So many bad acquisitions and failures to innovate (ESXi for ARM anyone?)

rhelz 2y ago
Docker had nothing to do with it?
- dangus 2y ago
  Right, nobody truly can save VMWare from becoming obsolete. Cloud computing and containerization has basically killed the value proposition of VMWare. The fact that VMWare didn't become the market leader in cloud computing like AWS says a lot.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    It’s the Kodak phenomenon. A software company like VMware would have had a hard time doing the capital investment necessary to be AWS, while simultaneously cannibalizing your real business. That’s why VMware tried to pivot to sticky stuff like EUC and dev platforms.
    - throwaway48476 2y ago
      Either you innovate and cannibalize existing business or squeeze existing customers and ride the decline. Broadcomm is the latter.
    - dangus 2y ago
      IMO I just don't think it would have been anything closet to being as difficult as a Kodak phenomenon for VMWare. AWS started quite small with just one service and it was funded by an extremely low profit margin e-commerce business. If VMWare had the product vision at the right time they could have been AWS.
      - Spooky23 2y ago
        No way. Bezos had the ability to do the Jedi mind trick to convince wall st that billions and billions of capital investment was ok. It’s also easier to sell massive datacenters when you’re good at building distribution centers and have low margins. VMware was a software company with that margin expectation. They tried a partner model that didn’t really work. The only other good option was something like IBM or Sun back in the day. I lived it - my first job was a software company that primarily served call centers in a specific vertical. The customers wanted out of the phone business and online… so they offered the full package. Fast forward a couple of years and the dot-com bubble bursts, and the investment dollars and lines of credit dry up. The founder mortgaged his house to keep the place open 60 days to complete an acquisition, which ultimately went through and everyone did ok. Two years earlier, we’d all be millionaires. 3 weeks later, holders of worthless paper for a bankrupt company. Timing matters more than anything.
        dangus 2y ago
        Amazon has been public since 1997. There's no Jedi Mind Trick involved with convincing investors to back AWS. The public has had their real financial results available to the public for a whole decade before AWS existed. They have been under pressure from shareholders in the same way that VMWare is. You're proposing the idea that VMWare had no idea how to build data centers as a company that builds data center abstraction virtualization software almost exclusively? VMware is a company that partnered with data center hardware companies to make VMWare-branded data center appliances. And they just...don't know how to set up a data center? If Amazon's expertise in e-commerce was a direct line of sight totally obvious foray into cloud computing we'd see Walmart, Target, and eBay operating AWS their own competitors. Amazon leadership saw an opportunity and understood the 20 year vision of how enterprise computing would work in the future. VMWare's managers are solely responsible for not seeing that future and failing to empower their teams to create new products in new categories. That is particularly embarrassing since they are subject matter experts on abstracting away hardware in the data center.
- natbennett 2y ago
  Docker was a factor but there's no particular reason why VMware had to take the lead they had in on-prem container platforms and throw it on the floor for OpenShift to pick up.

rhelz 2y ago

Docker had nothing to do with it?

dangus 2y ago
Right, nobody truly can save VMWare from becoming obsolete. Cloud computing and containerization has basically killed the value proposition of VMWare. The fact that VMWare didn't become the market leader in cloud computing like AWS says a lot.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  It’s the Kodak phenomenon. A software company like VMware would have had a hard time doing the capital investment necessary to be AWS, while simultaneously cannibalizing your real business. That’s why VMware tried to pivot to sticky stuff like EUC and dev platforms.
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    Either you innovate and cannibalize existing business or squeeze existing customers and ride the decline. Broadcomm is the latter.
  - dangus 2y ago
    IMO I just don't think it would have been anything closet to being as difficult as a Kodak phenomenon for VMWare. AWS started quite small with just one service and it was funded by an extremely low profit margin e-commerce business. If VMWare had the product vision at the right time they could have been AWS.
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      No way. Bezos had the ability to do the Jedi mind trick to convince wall st that billions and billions of capital investment was ok. It’s also easier to sell massive datacenters when you’re good at building distribution centers and have low margins. VMware was a software company with that margin expectation. They tried a partner model that didn’t really work. The only other good option was something like IBM or Sun back in the day. I lived it - my first job was a software company that primarily served call centers in a specific vertical. The customers wanted out of the phone business and online… so they offered the full package. Fast forward a couple of years and the dot-com bubble bursts, and the investment dollars and lines of credit dry up. The founder mortgaged his house to keep the place open 60 days to complete an acquisition, which ultimately went through and everyone did ok. Two years earlier, we’d all be millionaires. 3 weeks later, holders of worthless paper for a bankrupt company. Timing matters more than anything.
      - dangus 2y ago
        Amazon has been public since 1997. There's no Jedi Mind Trick involved with convincing investors to back AWS. The public has had their real financial results available to the public for a whole decade before AWS existed. They have been under pressure from shareholders in the same way that VMWare is. You're proposing the idea that VMWare had no idea how to build data centers as a company that builds data center abstraction virtualization software almost exclusively? VMware is a company that partnered with data center hardware companies to make VMWare-branded data center appliances. And they just...don't know how to set up a data center? If Amazon's expertise in e-commerce was a direct line of sight totally obvious foray into cloud computing we'd see Walmart, Target, and eBay operating AWS their own competitors. Amazon leadership saw an opportunity and understood the 20 year vision of how enterprise computing would work in the future. VMWare's managers are solely responsible for not seeing that future and failing to empower their teams to create new products in new categories. That is particularly embarrassing since they are subject matter experts on abstracting away hardware in the data center.
natbennett 2y ago
Docker was a factor but there's no particular reason why VMware had to take the lead they had in on-prem container platforms and throw it on the floor for OpenShift to pick up.