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?)
The fact that VMWare didn't become the market leader in cloud computing like AWS says a lot.
That’s why VMware tried to pivot to sticky stuff like EUC and dev platforms.
If VMWare had the product vision at the right time they could have been AWS.
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.
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.