VMware Confirms Layoffs as It Prepares for Dell Acquisition
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Ee should expect more such events to come. I wonder how much of the Yahoo! Workforce will be laid off once they spin off their core assets.
>The [austerity/ free market advocates] need to quit [complain]ing and just accept that we need to stimulate the demand side of the economy. The US and Europe are currently headed down the same course that Japan went down, and they're stuck in an inescapable stagnation. We've implemented the same QE and austerity policies that they did years before us, and now we're beginning to experience the same stagnation and gradual decline they did. Just like Japan we're propping up large, [poorly managed], decaying businesses at the expense of everything else in our economy, all while starving our economy's consumers of money.
>We've printed tons of money to fund big business, and cut back on social services so businesses won't have to pay as many taxes, and yet we only have a worsening economy to show for it. Unless you want the stock market to be the only segment of the economy that doesn't collapse, quit [explative] complaining and just hand people money.
Maybe we need to allow the free market to function. Who cares if house prices drom from $250,000 -> $50,000 and the Dow from 16,000 -> 3,000? They will eventually be snapped up by someone at some price, thus fulfilling 'demand.'
So much debt will be wiped out through defaults in this process as well, it will be great for the average person who will finally be able to afford to meaningfully participate in the investment world. Dividends yields of 2-6% mean nothing to a small time investor, but 20% is something that we could very well see in a liquidation market.
That is not what his comment says. It says we're not doing the stimulus needed.
Or better, find a way to raise wage levels, while dropping equities, especially real estate.
I'm a fan of government as employer of last resort.
Now somebody said that the humanity's greatest shortcoming is the inability to understand exponential function...
In most existing monetary regimes, money is not wealth, but debt.
>You need perpetual growth because all math models used in financial industry are based on perpetual exponential growth - imagine insurance companies, profitability, attractiveness of financial services, hedging etc. is based on the assumption the amount of debt (money) increases in time.
For example, let's imagine a company that sells toasters. At some point they're going to reach peak market saturation where everyone in the world has a toaster. Now during this process right when growth in it's peak we see an almost ethereal phenomenon that capitalism delivers. We see the most optimized form of an idea materialize which everyone can benefit from and gain wealth. Wealth in this case would be owning a toaster in it's most optimal form according to the laws of physics and current engineering processes.
The problem is that once this epoch takes place the projected exponential growth for the business just vanishes. Instead we see gradual decline until the new market cap (replacing broken toasters etc.) is reached and an thus an equilibrium in the market is reached. During this process we see the nasty side of capitalism as the toaster company fights tooth and nail to prevent this inevitable conclusion. We see monopolization, deliberate weakening of the integrity of the product to increase time to EOL (which wreaks havoc on the environment), absurd patenting and copyrighting, digital rights management, lobbying and bailouts. This not only hurts the customer, but the economy as a whole as our political system is set up to encourage this type of behavior.
Now, one of the main themes I'm seeing in this discussion is the problem of demand. It seems like a lot of "things" that our economy has relied on consumers purchasing has hit this market saturation point and is being limited by technological advancement.
I think that we are at a point where we need to change our financial structure to one that helps create demand. With the minimum federal wage remaining relatively stagnant for the past few decades along with more and more low level jobs being replaced by automation people simply don't have the money to buy things let alone make investments. The only real solution I see is a push for a universal minimal income. But then again, what do I know? Like I said, I'm not an economist..
You can't have houses lose 200k in value without severe repercussions to the economy around the world. House mortgages are connected to mortgage securities which are connected to pension funds, etc.
If we enter a massive deflationary period as you seem to think is good, then everyone will be holding cash and no one will be spending it because everything is going down in value. You can't get 20% dividend yields in a deflationary world.
Be careful what you wish for.
Nobody is going to make money in a deflationary period, and excess consumption will fall, but it is still necessary to consume at baseline. The stock market is a very poor representation of true consumption, as it prices in too much of the future viewed through a very specific set of circumstances and assumptions.
There is no crisis to fight in Europe, this is the "new normal" - unless they can get over their collective asses and move forward what schengen has started and become one grand federal state, otherwise everyone will proudly sit on their ruins in a couple decades.
but the barrier of entry to the market makes it a very uncompetitive are to start a business. just think about the new bullshit vat collection mechanism for online companies, think about southern countries being forced to keep their immigrants while stronger countries can sidestep the Dublin III regulation at their convenience, etc etc.
there is a great deal of unfairness, uncertainty, instability and risk in investing in Europe right now. Sure individual countries are fine by themselves, but if you consider them alone then china, usa, india and russia are all bigger markets with more prospect for growth than any single EU nation, while tapping the whole EU as a market means you need to comply with umptheen different codes, customer laws, taxes, exchange rates etc. yes, everyone use the euro except those who don't, and amongst those who do the purchasing power varies by countries so much it's common to have price tiers between different countries.
Its very dangerous because it makes the already wealthy and powerful even more so, and reduces choices for the consumer, while actually driving up costs because less competition.
While its a very simplistic point, the oil industry is a good example of this. Ignoring the greater geopolitical/strategic game around the petrodollar as a reserve currency, what is happening right now is all the strappy young startup oil companies are being gobbled up by the big guys. I'm pretty sure as soon as all the m&a's are done oil ppb will rocket back up.
If what you say is consistent, then EMC/VMware is overvalued in the M&A activity here (and honestly it might be).
The best correction I can make is that "leveraged private equity is aquiring inflated public assets"
But workstation was for long left on the backburner - we haven't had there a lot of killer features since '07 probably. So I guess it is not a new decision.
Clarification: I mean that workstation was deprioritized by corporate, not by the team that worked on it.
I personally spent 2 years of my life, starting in 2008, bringing Unity to Workstation on Linux and making it work with every combination of Linux and Windows I could throw at it. That work was continued by a teammate for several years.
I spent 3 years rewriting most of the foundation, UI, and server infrastructure for Workstation 8, bringing the ability to connect to remote VMware ESXi/vSphere servers, along with the server component of Workstation 8. This work allowed VMs to be hosted on any server and accessed from any other server, and allowed VMs to be pushed between servers. 3 solid years on this feature alone, given just how much was needed to make that happen.
In the same release, we replaced the old Teams feature (a single feature that provided a multi-VM UI along with software-defined networking segments) with a series of more independent, more useful features. These were just a couple of the major features released in Workstation 8, and with all this came cleanup in the UI to keep the experience sane, not bloated.
That came out in 2011.
Workstation 9, released in 2012, came with a web-based UI for interacting with VMs called WSX (a feature I dedicated a bit over a year to). It also added UI refinement for the features that come out in Workstation 8, more remote VM support, hardware improvements (USB 3, Hyper-V, OpenGL for Linux VMs, nested/Inception-like VMs), locked down virtual machines for IT, and probably more that I can't remember.
Workstation 10 followed that a year later, and brought guest hardware support for tablets, enhancements for Windows 8 hosts, more remote VM improvements, better command line automation for remote-controlling/creating VMs, and a bunch of other things. UI-wise, it was a smaller release, but it did a lot for the hardware support.
I left around this time to focus on Review Board (https://www.reviewboard.org/) full-time.
Since then, they released 2 major versions: Workstation 11 and 12. From what I can tell, these were largely about hardware improvements and performance improvements, less about major UI changes, but there's a lot that has to happen for these improvements. Hardware improvements are crucial to keeping the VMs useful in many situations. Performance was also a focus. While building these releases, the team was also busy helping out the View team by helping them consume bits of the Workstation/Fusion codebase. They also begun development of AppCatalyst and Flex.
There's also work that happened on Player, Ace, and other things, all throughout.
So that's a lot of killer features in my opinion :) I barely scratched the surface of 8, and didn't go into all the stuff we did in 6 and 7.
We were all very proud of the product, and often spent our free time working on it. I should point out, this was not a large team by any means. It was an amazing team, though. A family. One that will survive these layoffs, one way or another.
These features may have been prohibited by corporate management for some reason since ESXi have passtrough. And yeah - I view it from strong power user/developer/gaming angle, not sysadmin.
A teammate just told us he's bummed he didn't have just a bit longer to work on Workstation, because he had a few things left he wanted to fix and rework for the next release. Our personal todo lists were so long, we could have filled another 10 releases... Shame we didn't have that opportunity.
That was and still is a killer feature.
I know about rr and such, it's just another level to be able to record whole system state.
[1]: VMWare Workstation 7 demo about Replay Debugging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjZWn3iDPiM
Workstation was my go to as well for desktop development needs for many years, but switched to VirtualBox after Workstation 10. Kernel updates on Linux often broke Workstation. You needed to wait for VMware to release an update, upgrade to the next version (that would also soon lag behind latest kernels), or search for a patch over on Arch[0].
VirtualBox does the trick but Workstation's a better product.
It just warmed my heart that you and your team put your heart and soul to that product and loved every second of it. Thanks for doing all that hard work and doing it the way it's supposed to be done.
I was already a bit troubled by the shameless yearly waves of "upgrade begging", and by VmWare clearly keeping features back to try and segment the market (especially with Fusion, because "everyone knows Apple users are rich idiots"). This final nail will likely push our company to VirtualBox for good, it's become the standard in OSS circles anyway. You did well to leave, VmWare as a company has lost direction.
The past two eyars, MSFT have cut a large number of people annually. CSCO have been cutting a large number annually since 2011 (though this is more of a migration of staff to lower cost economies/newer focus areas). HP have a long history of annual staff cuts. Even Google has been cutting staff on an off for the last 4 years (mostly post acquisition).
In most of the country (California is probably an exception), the company does not have to pay anything at all.
I don't know about "usually". A lot of these big SV companies seem to usually pay some severance.
> Also, what are the usual time limits in the industry?
What time limits do you mean? As in, what notice do they have to give you? In much if not most of the country, none.
Was just wondering as this might screw up with someone if they are short on money, have mortgage, etc.
In EU, there is some minimum notice time (I think two weeks?). In practice (from what I've seen) it's usually two to three months, but layoffs would be done immediately by agreement (basically pay for that period anyway). Minimum severance is one-month-pay (average, so bonuses included) for each year worked, limited to three.
So in real life, one would get 5-6 months pay when being laid off. Depending on the situation (reason for the lay off), one might not be able to spend their vacation and that would have to be paid off as well. On top of that you might apply for unemployment benefit (which you paid for, so I'm not sure how relevant it is).
I could walk into work this morning, get laid off, and escorted out of the building without notice. That's it, done, no more salary. To make it even worse, you also lose the subsidized health insurance. My employer pays about 60% of the cost for my family, so my monthly premiums would jump from $800 to nearly $2000 a month at the same time my income drops to near zero.
Sure there's unemployment payments, but they're usually only a fraction of your previous salary, and are often capped to a maximum by your individual state.
Welcome to capitalism ;)
You have to give at least two weeks warning to the employer if you want to leave, but if they want to fire you, they just show you the door without warning. Note that the employer may then just fire you anyways, so your courteous notice results in two weeks without pay. For some reason, this is considered fine, even in industries where it's a laborer's market.
Still even provisions like that are inconsistently applied. I worked at an internal development studio of a large video game publisher that closed, resulting in the layoff of all ~90 employees. The studio had two offices: one in Los Angeles, California and another, smaller office in Austin, Texas. The employees at the LA office were covered under the WARN act and thus paid/insured through the end of the year (2 months) and received company severance on top of that. Those of us at the smaller Austin office were not covered under the WARN act as we had less than 50 employees at that location. Instead we received a check for our last two week pay period and the aforementioned severance package.
Anyway I'm not sure this scenario is any better than the US scenario of little to no employee protection. Sure, it means you're not flat and your back from day one, but the cost firing anyone is substantial, making it very difficult particularly for small business to hire simply because the risk is too great. I'd be keen to learn if there are other ways to reduce that risk than simply making it easier to fire people indiscriminately.
That's not exactly true, the company does have to pay unemployment insurance and each state has varying laws. Most states tax sites will have the documents.
If the company isn't in dire financial straits, it's common to give some severance pay, usually tied to length of employment. This isn't a requirement.
With the US's ridiculous system of getting most health insurance through your employer, it does mean that you lose many of those health benefits. There is a legal provision called COBRA where you can continue for a time on your previous employer's health care (at your expense). The ACA (Obamacare) makes losing your health insurance less dire than it was in the past (for things like "pre-existing conditions"), but it still sucks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
>An employer who violates the WARN provisions is liable to each employee for an amount equal to back pay and benefits for the period of the violation, up to 60 days.
...pretty much says companies can do what they want. For a lot of these folks, that's a severance.
The funny thing is, virtualization is dying. All of the large private datacenters these days are non-virtualized bare metal on commodity hardware. Virtualization is an unnecessary overhead when it comes to datacenters these days. And enterprise storage is also not "web scale" since it's faster to shard data across 100k servers than have a single huge database with a single point of failure.
What I see Dell doing is consolidating products in a space that is shrinking while offering a unified datacenter product which has two target customers:
* Bringing dinosaurs into the modern age with a "private cloud" * Bringing maturing organizations into the physical realm offering the advantages and alternatives to public cloud offerings
I disagree, the amount of dependency we have on virtualization at my current organization ( which has been a leader in On premises software systems ) is huge. And we are still generating the majority of revenue from there.
Well, you sound like a Google employee, because that's pretty much their party line.
Of course, reality doesn't mesh up with that when you step out and look at other data centers.
At scale, in prod, virt is legacy. Aside from Linode where I obviously ran virt, the only virt I've ever touched in private datacenters is relegated to labs or testing farms. We have a lot of tech, both from supercomputing and the new valley stuff which is inexplicably rewriting all of that, that makes virtualization completely unnecessary outside of a multitenant situation with separate paying customers and security domains. Even there multiple vendors are working on it, notably Intel, who is pushing VT-x into containers with multiple efforts.
Don't be so confident to talk about reality, because yours is very different from mine. The original poster was unguarded with their claim but in terms of winds of the industry, they couldn't be more correct, and if you think I'm wrong you're on the wrong side of the shift that is coming, nigh already here.
Example: We bought space in Virginia for Foursquare and didn't deploy a single byte of virt. My current employer has dozens of facilities and virt is a lab thing. No prod, anywhere, across dozens of products and lines and organizations, uses virt. Google doesn't, right you are. Nor does Twitter, who is deep into Mesos (same for everyone who is also deep into Mesos or its many friends).
You might scoff and say well, my CIO says, and you'd be correct today, but the state of the art for resource utilization at scale moved away from virt because we figured out that running full operating systems next to each other as a bandaid for bad CD and provisioning and resource allocation stories is a shitload of overhead for zero gain. There is absolutely nothing that virt gives you, aside from a perf hit and unpredictable low-level behavior (some of us care about cache lines and context switches), which cannot be implemented with tooling atop bare metal platforms. Virt makes your hot aisle hotter so you don't have to figure out bare metal provisioning. You should care about that, then figure it out. It's not hard.
If you are strongly convinced that I'm wrong, much like your neighbor posters, the state of the art simply hasn't made it to you yet. Sorry. You should be willing to consider, however, instead of sniping at change like your tone will keep it at bay. There is a lot of denial in this thread, and it's trivial to deduce why that is.
In other words, you are ~very~ (edit:) Exceptionally offended that your opinion is different than mine from your experience, whereas most of the paperwork on the industry as a whole does not agree with your experience.
I get that you're mad, but you should take your emotions out of the equation and look at the numbers published by literally every industry analyst.
Perhaps it is not me who should step back and reevaluate.
Part of the problem here is a lack of specificity on the industry. Since you invoked analysts, Gartner and the typical HN view of "industry" are wildly different, but I would posit what happens in what we typically call the "industry" is in the pipeline for the Gartner side in about a decade. However, tickers I would normally put in the Gartner/CIO bucket are aligning with me on this, more than you'd expect. Even Manhattan finance.
And yes, I am aware of CAGR forecasts for virt, but a big driver of the market's growth is expansion of virt deployment footholds thanks in no small part to momentum fueled by opinions like yours. There is also an incentive to sell virt by hardware and procurement vendors, because you need more fleet to do the same work under virt, unconditionally. The market will level off because fewer new projects and companies are reaching for virt as evidenced by, yes, Google, and half the other household names in the valley.
Thought exercise: Google published Dataflow out of their work on streaming architecture and said they are moving on from MapReduce (for the most part). If you got research that says the Hadoop market is growing, wouldn't you look at it objectively in context since the very organization who defined the technology has moved on from it? Market research and analysis often lacks frontline context, much as it does here.
And people are moving to OS level virtualization instead. But the point still stands, for any independent datacenter, there is plenty of business sense in using virtulization to serve customers needs. Heck, even for an internal datacenter, hw virtualization makes sense for developement, testing, and general infrastructure.
For application specific purposes virtulization was never really a good idea to begin with, plenty of people have said that ever since it became a thing, but "State of the art" was virtualization. Now the developers realise that virtualization wasn't the way to go, and revert back to bare metal, or OS virtualization. It is a classic example of a fad because it was a buzzword.
Virtualization is not going anywhere, and I don't think most companies will be adopting bare metal en masse as you suggest especially as virtualized extensions to containers like rancherVM become commonplace.
Also, many in the financial sector prefer the security benefits of hypervisor and VT-x isolation to reduce exposure to kernel/hw-level exploits.
Do you have a citation for this or are you just propagating your personal issues with Google again?
This is so hilariously wrong I can only assume it's from a marketing brochure.
It's just cheaper and easier for us to have a lot of hardware racked and stacked and then spin it up as needed without having to worry about virtualization. Experience for our devs is pretty much the same whether they're provisioning a bare metal machine as it would be for a VM.
This is wrong on so many levels. Virtualization is, and will continue to be, a integral part of datacenters. First and foremost, it enables you to deploy one single image to any machine you have, if you need computation nodes. Or it enables you to have multiple VMs on the same hardware. Both of those apply to commodity and server hardware a like.
Containers may change the game. If you can containerize on top of something like Mesos, Kubernetes, etc - there is no need to run on top of a virtualization layer.
Counterpoint: Dell's modular datacenter solution is doing well and really murdering the competition.
Instead, I fear EMC will now end up with Dell quality. Ugh.
Storage is an end-point. You can control almost all the variables inside. Networking is in the middle. You can control almost none of the variables.
My interaction with EMC on the other hand, particularly on the CE side has always been positive. Their CEs are consistently some of the most competent people I've dealt with across multiple vendors; Oracle, Netapp, etc.
Lenovo etc. to me are more targeted towards a consumer audience. My enterprise customers demand the high touch experience and subsequently drives my interactions with vendors too. So to me there's a clear difference between various players. Not right or wrong but a difference nonetheless.
Besides, VCE not withstanding, it just seemed to me Cisco's product lines would have been much more complementary to EMC&VMware's than Dell's but that's just me.
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vmware-lawsuit...
Then apparently version 2.0 was handed for the Java and XML fetichists to be developed and it was a huge bloated mess. It worked, but badly.
It looked like they knew what they were doing at first, but today we have virtualization services built into the processors and in the OS, making things easier
They 'won' virtualisation, but then virtualisation changed to 'cloud' and they never hung on.
But it worked, and it worked well. More a testament to the infrastructure we had built for Workstation, and our team's ability to work hard and work well together.
Neither of those are possible. The worst case scenario is a 15% return on your money, even if the stock does nothing but tank over the entire period. You purchase the stock at a 15% discount at the lower of the price at either the beginning or end of the period.
If the stock was at $100 at the beginning and $120 at the end and you put in $1000 you would get 11.7 shares of VMW stock (purchased at $85 each) with a current market value of $1411, you can sell that on the open market the next day for a 41% return.
Likewise if you put in $1000 and the stock went from $100 to $80 over the period you would get 14.7 shares (purchased at $68) with a market value of $1176, a 17% return. It doesn't matter how much the stock goes down, you're still buying a thousand dollars worth of stock at 15% less than market value, even if the stock went from $100 to $10 you'd buy 117.6 shares for $8.5 (which would be worth $1176 at $10 a share).
Possible, but not common or likely. The shares are granted at the end of one trading day (which will be the close of that day if that's lower than at the beginning of the period) and are available for sell the next trading day. e.g. my last ESPP grant was on a Friday and I sold my shares at the open on the following Monday.
So for someone to lose money through the ESPP the stock a) would need to be lower at the end of the period then the beginning and b) drop 15% at the open. Let's say such a move happens once a year to the average stock, there are about 250 trading days in a year so you have a 0.4% chance of that happening. (realistically it's probably even lower than that since drastic moves like opening down 15% are much more likely to occur following an earnings announcement than on an average day and ESPP grants and earnings aren't aligned)
ESPP and RSUs are two different and unrelated things. Your original comment I responded to mentioned only ESPP.
As for RSUs they're tradeable as soon as they vest, which is typically a year+ after they're granted. The stock can certainly go down between when they were granted and when they vest but it's more accurate to say you made less money then that you lost money. If I buy a painting for a million dollars and give it to you (at no cost) and you then sell it for $800K you didn't lose $200K.
Don't get me wrong I (and every other VMW employee) would much rather see our stock go up then down, but I think you're being a bit unfair to the ESPP and RSU programs. Even when our stock goes down (and it's done pretty much only that since I started...which I hope is just coincidence, ha) it still works out better than the stock options employees at other companies (particularly startups) get.
There is also better gpu support from anedotal experience.
Obviously its UI etc is much more raw - I'm curious how it compares performancewise.
I'm on a Mac. VMWare Fusion runs Windows 7 and 8 with noticeably less lag than VirtualBox. For Linux (Ubuntu Trusty) and FreeBSD 10, I've never noticed a difference.
However, it's losing the standardization field to VirtualBox, all OSS tools are using that by default and vmware support is always lagging.
HPE may have been free'd from some restrictions, but I think many would have drawn HP-EDS-Compaq-Digital comparisons, and rightly so.
This is private equity acquiring EMC because that was the company's last resort and it should color one's perspective appropriately.