I was overjoyed to get a job here. It really surprised me because back then I thought I had no chance. That was six years ago. I really could never have thought that in 2022 this would be a company like it is today. I once thought that Citrix had a bright future ahead. Perhaps it was clear a long ago that the company was sinking, maybe I just didn't realize it? Some are already looking forward to becoming targets. It's terrible.
5 replies (most recent on top)
I left in 2015 and thought then that the company could be on the decline. The stock continued to do well but it’s clear that all was not well below the surface. TTU was always a shell game.
The thing about Citrix is it extended the life of sh---y legacy apps that are expensive to refactor for cloud. Every IT shop has a handful of apps that are worth really investing in and 500 more that are just there in the background that aren’t critical to the business but still serve a purpose. Citrix makes these apps more useful and legacy apps have a long tail.
I agree the pandemic timing is ironic but in many ways WFH made big Cloud more serious about competing in this space and the fact that no other company took this space very seriously was always what allowed Citrix to persevere for many years.
I still have lots of friends there and my career is also somewhat depending on success of Citrix so I wish all the best in the transition. Who knows, look at what happened to Dell when they were private.
What leadership missed or ignored at their own peril was the shift from XenDesktop to DaaS, and Microsoft finally deciding to make this part of their offering rather than allow Citrix to make profit on top of their stack.
How did you not see this coming? Citrix was losing customers hand over fist to MS, Sharefile and XenMobile were dead long ago but the company still held on and talked about intune integration and better together nonsense with MS. Anyone trying to integrate those product lines together needs their head checked.
Strategic thinking wasn't there, one bad acquisition after another, to name a few; Wrike(Podio 2.0), Intelligent workspace (took one year to implement workday and concur approvals), Shambolic (D.O.A), cloud.com (kwell name btw) and Podio (on life support for 10 years).
They thought doubling down on virtual apps and desktops would create a significant moat, which most of the investment went into Citrix Cloud. Everyone knew MS was going to get in the DaaS/AVD, eventually, it would be good enough.
SaaS and web apps were taking over the world but Citrix was convinced people would still pay 1000 bucks to access internet explorer on a windows server. Late to the party with workspace for SaaS and web, zscaler gobbled your lunch old-timer.
The world of tech has changed and Citrix is an example where acquisitions and innovation just didn’t keep pace. The invention of webapps, SaaS, google apps, office 365, SSO players all making Remote Desktop and some application management solutions redundant. VMware Horizon will go the same way soon. It’s sales growth has been dwindling for a while.
I agree! Who would of ever thought that Citrix died during a pandemic when everyone in the world was working from home. It opened my eyes to realize how bad of a company it really is. They didn’t acquire good companies. They have no innovation. In the end other companies were ahead of the game. Many years ago there were always rumors Microsoft was going to buy Citrix. Today, no one wants to buy Citrix. It is so sad…