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Comment by VoodooJuJu | Hacker News Reader

I just find it fascinating that I can go through my life and see things like this: "[Company I've never heard of] and [Another company I've never heard of], something something, billions and billions of dollars". And these companies and the people who run them probably have a non-trivial impact on my life, if not directly than indirectly.

It's just fascinating.

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Citrix are pretty ubiquitous in the corporate space. Not as big a deal as they were ten or 15 years ago, but still a huge company that powers a lot of businesses.

I've heard of the name, I kind of just assumed they made orange juice. Tibco is that British supermarket? Kinda makes sense.

Oh well, on with my day.

> Tibco is that British supermarket?

I'm not British, so it also took me a while to realize that Tibco wasn't Tesco.

Tesco is a Tibco customer.

https://www.tibco.com/blog/2019/11/06/tesco-bank-and-postnl-...

Citrix originally licensed the technology for the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to Microsoft.

RDP was a pared back version of Citrix, and the license terms left Citrix free to sell a with a more fully-featured virtualised desktop product running on top of Windows Server.

Oh wow I had no idea about this. Always thought that RDP was something MS developed and Citrix was a more of an RDP alternative with better centralised management features, OEM integration, etc.

Wikipedia says "Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is a proprietary protocol developed by Microsoft" and that "[the] Terminal Services Edition of NT 4.0 relied on Citrix's MultiWin technology, previously provided as a part of Citrix WinFrame atop Windows NT 3.51, in order to support multiple users and login sessions simultaneously". Based on this it sounds to me like the protocol itself was the work of Microsoft and that Citrix built an extension to the server that multiplexed it. It also later remarks that "[the] T.128 application sharing technology was acquired by Microsoft from UK software developer Data Connection Limited", so it would seem that the protocol itself is a series of extensions developed on top of an open standard that they got via acquisition.

Years ago I worked in defense contracting. The US Department of Defense uses Citrix (which is easily Google-able; don't come at me about "OpSec") and my experience with it was always abysmal compared to RDP. I have a funny feeling that even with Microsoft in the mix it'd be cheaper and better for everybody involved to just pay M$ for the RDP CALs and ditch the dinosaur that is Citrix altogether.

I have managed large Citrix farms and if you have the bandwith RDP blows it away. Lot less options and control but with decent bandwith and high settings RDP is pretty nice.

That being said I hear VMware Horizon blows away Citrix too

I will never touch Citrix again.

It took an act of God to get the Horizon client working last I used it (weirdness with client SSL libraries... on Windows no less) but it worked pretty well once I got it set up.

Citrix is typically used over WAN or internet and RDP over fatter pipes. Citrix gives a more complete desktop experience using less bandwidth. Not typical concerns where RDP is dominant.

My understanding is that back in the early 2000s the Citrix ICA and Microsoft RDP protocols were nearly identical. Common code and all that.

One of the reasons companies licensed Citrix is because Citrix kept investing in ICA and it was about 2-3 times as bandwidth efficient. In the era of 64 Kbps ISDN WAN links this was critical.

Microsoft did something around 2008 and now RDP seems better overall. It can handle 4K at 30 fps without difficulty.

Meanwhile Citrix did weird random things to ICA that made it markedly worse.

It says a lot that all of the Citrix engineers I’ve worked with (including myself) prefer to RDP into a Citrix server instead of using its native ICA protocol!

Other deliberate breakage was Citrix deprecating SSL support directly on the session hosts. They did this to force customers to buy their overpriced Netscaler / ADC appliances. These slow down connections and can’t handle many 4K streams.

Generally they seem to have become an acquisition-driven company instead of an engineering-led one.

Don't forget that Citrix had a Terminal Server offering before Microsoft incorporated it into Terminal Server. That was the big offer in my mind, not the RDP client, but the ability to connect multiple end users to one Windows NT server back in NT 3.51/4's early days.

I worked at Citrix from 1996 thru 2000. In the early days, Citrix was licensing Windows NT (source code) from Microsoft and selling a modified version of it such that (a) one could remotely control/display Windows apps, and (b) multiple users could do this simultaneously. At a certain point (‘98?) Microsoft announced they would soon offer the same functionality as Citrix, and the stock got crushed. In the end, though, it seemed Microsoft decided the practical thing to do would be to roll their own version of “(a)” (dubbed “RDP”) and license “(b)” (back, as it were) from Citrix. At least I think it was something like that.

Spot on with Citrix not being as big a deal as they once were. 10 years ago any reasonable sized desktop app deployment went through Citrix, now it's migrating to web apps. I struggle to see the long term value proposition in Citrix but my experience is limited to finance and pharma.

At work, I need to use Citrix to check my email on Lotus Notes!

you still use Lotus Notes? wtf ?

IBM employee probably...

IBM still uses Lotus Notes??

Yes, because they could never migrate off of it to a more modern product :)))

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27692965

it is actually worse, they probably use a frankenstein mix of Notes, Exchange, Office365, and something else

Oh my god. Alright that's enough internet for today I think

Financial company.

IBM still exists?

There's very good money to be made in consulting if you "know" Lotus Notes. Even a lot more if you know how to migrate the thing (presumably to MS Exchange).

Back in the corporate Windows desktop space of the early 2000s, the Citrix product was almost like magic. The problem it aimed to solve was reduction in cost and effort to deliver applications to users. Instead of managing a fleet of 'expensive' desktop computers, you install the desktop applications on a Citrix server and 'publish' them over a remote desktop protocol. The potential was huge! It was a real challenge to do this at the time. Citrix made it relatively easy to turn any old desktop PC or cheap terminal into a powerful workstation with the resources of a large server. The effect was extremely exciting at the time. A user was assigned a bunch of applications, so when they lpgged into the Citrix client they'd be able to run those applications no matter what device they were on. They could disconnect from running applications and reconnect from another device. There was the added bonus that it worked pretty well over slow network connections (some screen lag, but all other operations at the backend were lightning fast since the application ran in the date center on a beefy server). However, it was expensive. Either you had to have very deep pockets, or you need to dip into you desktop PC budget, fulfilling new hardware requests with existing refurbished PCs or new thin clients (at a lower cost). I never met an IT manager that was willing to do that. If it didn't work out, they'd be stuck with useless thin clients and the prospect of an expensive desktop refresh along with a backlog of applications to repackage and deploy via other means (Windows SMS Server, Group Policy etc). Also, very few people were doing remote work back then.

Citrix tried to pivot into other spaces like virtualization (Xen) but that market was flooded with alternatives, and most companies who used Xen were happy with the free version.

And then to reality (when I was forced to use it at a client):

Insanely unbaringly slow with tons of constant lag and IT issues.

I know, anecdote...

My anecdote is that it works much better than any X Windows setup that I have used, and since around 2011 it is either Citrix or RDP on most of our projects.

If we get projects with customers that will rather hand us low quality Dells with 4 / 8 GB with HDD, to access their infrastructure, I will always advocate for a Citrix or RDP based setup instead, due to how bad those laptops tend to be.

Can such a setup have a lossless presentation of the GUI? Personally I really dislike using a modern computer via a lossy video signal, just as a matter of principle. Same reason I'm not interested in cloud gaming even if the latency is great.

Yes HDMI quality isn't expected, but still much better then those lousy laptops anyway.

That's something else that had a tendency to kill a Citrix deal. But implementation details are important. In my experience, managers who worked from home loved it because they could get the complete office desktop experience at home. There'd be some visual lag for sure, but visual latency aside, file and print operations were snappy and reliable. Trying to open an Excel spreadsheet over a dial-up network drive took ages. Print jobs were worse. Most installations I saw were POCs that got used as a remote work solution for managers. Any time they decided to deploy an app to all office staff the thing would predictably fall over, because it wasn't sized for that.

The world is a really big place.

For example, when Okta bought Auth0 last year, that was titanic for my employer (we're in their space). But it barely made a ripple to anyone outside of the auth space. People still confuse Auth0 with OAuth when I give talks!

I think about it in other ways too. Look around you. Wherever you are, unless you are in the wilderness, there are 1000s of companies that worked to bring the built environment to you. Whether that be a picture frame, an envelope, a laundry basket, whatever.

It's humbling.

I find the Auth0 acquisition to be more impressive. Many people (even non-tech) know about Citrix because of Windows. Almost no one outside of tech (and many people inside tech too) knows anything about auth0. Yet, we have a company that was acquired for 6.5 billions of dollars.

The combined market cap of the S&P 500 is 30.5 trillion. The companies everyone knows about probably account for about ~10T. The remaining 20T represents a long tail of unknown companies worth a few 10s of billions.

If you are into learning more about this, I found this article fascinating: https://strategyofsecurity.com/okta-auth0-q2-2021-results/

It also points to the Okta investor presentations and call transcripts, which are fascinating. The latest one has this tidbit: "It's like there's a customer identity cloud, and that's Auth0, and there's a workforce identity cloud, which is both for employees and for your extended workforce, partners and suppliers and things that are kind of workforce like, and those are the platforms in the product suites we go to market with."

https://investor.okta.com/static-files/b52f68c6-0979-4c49-9e...

> "[Company I've never heard of] and [Another company I've never heard of],

I'm going to guess you're under 30?

Amongst the many things Tibco sold was Rendezvous, which was extremely popular in the banks for running trading systems back in... the 90s and early 00s. Then of course, multi-core chips came along and sending messages to other processes on single cores over the network, versus, other processes in the same bit of silicon via memory instead.

And Citrix - another extremely popular bit of software for connecting remotely to Windows boxes (amongst other things). Again in the 90s and early 00s.

There seems to be so many of these zombie companies now. Embarcadero is another one that always springs to mind. Produces nothing new, just shambles around on existing revenue streams.

I worked with Tibco's message queue back in the 00's somewhere...but to be honest I though they had gone under.

Citrix should be more well known, but if you've never worked in a Windows environment then perhaps not.

JMS righ?

Tibco has pulsar, kafka and jms for mainstream streaming & queueing use cases. And FTL for low latency messaging. Not exactly on TechCrunch, but there is a lot of it out there in enterprises.

Citrix also has a major load balancer/“ADC” business - formerly Netscaler. Had to look it up recently for a k8s ingress controller.

Citrix is alive and well in large organisations

My current, HUGE employer bases its whole remote/local workstation tech on Citrix products.

At a previous, also HUGE employer, we used Tibco Rendezvous for FX trade messaging and it was a great product, in that it was performant and never seemed to fail.

The successor to Rendezvous called FTL is optimized for low latency messaging over shared mem/rdma/infiniband etc and even inter-thread within a process. There is some neat distributed systems engineering in systems like FTL if your work depends on that kinda thing (trading, manufacturing, logistics, etc.) For the rest, there is always Pulsar/Kafka/WS/JMS.

https://docs.tibco.com/pub/ftl/4.3.0/doc/html/GUID-C2A32299-...

Tibco is responsible for Jaspersoft.

Jaspersoft is both insanely powerful and will make you want to kill the authors and then yourself.

There isn’t really anything else that does what it does though and you can take that statement both ways.

I really hate Jaspersoft but unless you work in a certain kind of enterprise environment you can go an entire career without running into it.

I haven’t thought about JasperSoft since 2009. I didn’t know it was still a thing,

Was as of 2019 when I left that job and never had to touch that monstrosity again.

Don't worry, it's super extensible! All you have to is write a java class with the right interface, modify a massive spring xml file, and inject your class at the one right place to make everything work!

Hope you didn't want documentation on the class interface though. I'm sure you can figure it out from context...

Egads this sounds like Minecraft modding without forge or fabric.

I find it fascinating you went through your life so far without knowing about citrix.

As a former Citrix user, I’m a little jealous.

This is the proper response haha. I'd pay $16.5B to never use it again.

Haha.. As much as I disliked it, if someone offered me that much money to use it, sure, I would do so with a grin.

The two worst things about going to work are Citrix and the coffee. WFH only fixes one of them.

Imagine how bad Citrix is as an end user of it. Now imagine having to be the one that sets all that up and maintains it. And has to deal with their support.

Citrix Cloud is also hilariously bad

Throw some crystal reports and a “coffee bag” (as in like the tea bag) for good measure and a dash of Sharepoint and DCOM. Now we are talking. DAO recordsets too (no not DAO as in Ethereum!)

Crystal Reports! <shudder> that name hasn’t been mentioned in my house (or thought about) in nearly 2 decades.

Ever want to use crystal reports to generate scannable paper correspondence for tens of thousands of businesses in a single job? The state of Wisconsin sure did!

I was going to comment when the Citrix Workspace updater popped up even though I explicitly asked not to be notified about updates, a setting that is hidden by the worst settings menu I've ever seen on a Mac app (there seem to be ways to stop the app to run in the background, but why does it even need to? It's not like 2 seconds of startup time will make any difference with the latency I experience working with the product)

Anyhow, I was so happy Sharepoint was dropped for OneDrive, a slightly less bad product (and same with Teams/Skype)

DCOM. The Guantanamo Bay of distributed computing.

Still not as bad as QuickTime.

Coffee is one of those things for me where no matter how bad it is, it's still good.

If it's brown, liquid and caffeinated then I'm happy. Especially if I'm drinking it first thing in the morning.

Not that I don't enjoy good coffee. But my bar is pretty low.

If you didn't have a old-style corporate job, how would you encounter Citrix?

Because it is a very well known software company. I have never used Citrix, but to me its as a name the same way as VMWare, SAP, EMC, Salesforce and Intuit is.

Again, all those are old-style enterprise software. If you didn't work in a legacy corporate environment, you'd never encounter them.

I think anyone who has ever had a sales or support job has to deal with Salesforce in one form or the other.

Umm. If you file taxes with a computer, you’re using Intuit.

If you have a datacenter, it has a good shot of running some VMware.

If you run logistics at almost any medium sized or bigger company, you’re using SAP or Oracle.

If you have a group of employees that sell things, Salesforce is common.

This is the software that literally runs the world. If you’re not familiar with it, then you’re ignorant about how the world works. Nothing wrong with that of course, but I don’t understand the pride in it. Especially on HN, where Hackers tend to be curious.

Intuit has no relevance if you don’t live in the US

Turbotax sure (includes Canada), but Quickbooks is used globally.

There are many countries (the UK I can say with certainty, but I believe also the EU), where no 3rd party software is needed to complete a tax return for a typical person.

Either it's completely automatic (like most PAYE employees in the UK), or the tax system is simplified to point where it's a simple form to complete.

I heard of TIBCO in two ways, the first time was from my housemates friend who was visiting. We were still poor college students and this friend was making fat stacks as a consultant for TIBCO. Apparently their business model is selling their system for cheap, throwing in as much support and help as they can integrating it deep in their clients business processes. And once that's succesful they raise the prices each year to exorbitant amounts.

The other way I learned at a meetup that was hosted by the ING (a large international bank). An architect was trying to recruit me to come work at ING and explained their fancy architecture to me. Right at the heart of it was a TIBCO message passing layer. It made me cringe.

I don't know why they couldn't have just picked rabbitmq or something, probably similar reasons to why some companies pick oracle over postgres. I don't think it's worth it, but I'm not an enterprise architect.

If you're only in startups, that would make sense but citrix is big in the corporate world. I worked for a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway for a few years out of college and our who setup depended on citrix. Keeping it vague, we allowed people to bid for allocations of space on transportation infrastructure. When a huge company wanted to spend millions to buy some space, they'd download our client which was actually just a citrix portal that tunneled to desktop software running on our servers. My company was a billion dollar company so you may have never heard of them, but citrix was absolutely crucial to our cash flow.

I find it fascinating when I see "[Company I haven't heard of for so long that it might as well have died] acquired for [surprisingly large amount of money]"

Zombie companie somehow eats brains of another near zombie company.

"Dinosaurs mating" was the old phrase.

Wow! I am surprised - I thought Xen hypervisor was a household name at least within the software industry. Looks like not! Haha.

Anyone who has worked in a large company/bank knows who they are.

Worked at a F500 company.

Never heard of those.

You would have definitely used Citrix products, but unless you were in IT you might not have known they were Citrix.

I’ve heard of shops that had all developers use Citrix. But mostly I’ve seen it the context of CSR types being forced to use it so they wouldn’t have access to a computer.

You’ve never heard of Citrix? How old are you?

Doesn't exactly qualify you for knowing about IT software.

be thankful, both of them produce awful, awful software

the citrix garbage I have to use to log into work is like Windows 95, it regularly corrupts its own install (on a machine only used for that)

and of course the uninstaller doesn't clean up everything, so you have to download a separate program to clean that up

and the less said about tibco rendezvous the better

Citrix Workspace? The client? Very stable for me and Citrix VDI is pretty amazing on low bandwidth.

I find it fascinating that you haven't heard of Tibco and Citrix.

Back in the 90s or early 2000s Citrix had amazing technology.

The world is vast, and the tech world is no different.

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