Thread regarding VMware layoffs

Our SE's and architects have stopped working with customers and
doing at home projects

Did people stop being interested to do those things cause failure, or
did the continual disappointments cause those things to stop?

Ki----g the vCenter C# client was the beginning of the end.

The C# client should have never existed.
The reason it existed is actually a greatly highlights the fact that smart people can make d-mb, selfish, decisions.

Ki----g the vCenter C# client was the beginning of the end.

Really disappointing to blame our failures on DEI. There are plenty of legacy "traditional" hires who have run this company into the ground from Cisco, Dell, and HPE. Last I checked, Dom, Chris Augestine, and Michael Dell weren't "Diverse".

I may be of different thought but VMware hasn't failed. We were just acquired at $61BILLION! I would say that's an amazing exit strategy for a 22 year old software company. We made the board rich.

VMware choose to strategically not pursue the Public Cloud and exited early. Could we have been #3 in that market? Maybe. We are who we are though.

My only feeling of failure with new leadership is that we have seemed to abandon the EPIC2 values since the departure of Pat G. We seemed to have failed ourselves in not believing in the possibilities of our portfolio. We failed to stop thinking of our products as inferior to an upstart and focused on discounting new skus to make sales peoples pockets fat.

Our SE's and architects have stopped working with customers and doing at home projects to show how our stuff can create the same magic as any hyperscaler who just uses open source tools. Where are the ref. archs? Where are the blog posts? He-l where is the Mastering vSphere 7 book?

In no specific order...

1. Not remaining independent part A. EMC2 handcuffed the SDDC abstraction layer by restricting the move to virtualize storage meaning a 2 legged stool. That created headwinds to become a defacto abstraction layer across the hyperscalers.
2. Not remaining independent part B. Dell Tech simply used the FCF of the company to fund his LBO efforts of legacy Dell and EMC2. Just as Broadcom will use the FCF of VMware to fund future LBO efforts. It has never been about the tech, but about grabbing cash with MD and HT.
3. Not forcing decisions to become a real platform company across infrastructure abstraction, management, and security. Raghu and Co are product guys, not platform people. Same for Pat and Paul before. Product teams were / are never forced to standardize on code base, API's, and platform level services. There is a ton of overlap across products which just wastes engineering cycles and creates ivory towers in BU's. it is empowered and inefficient.
4. Management out of their depth and unable/unwilling/unqualified to drive change and focus. The quality of middle and upper management at VMware is below average with many people on staff "doing it for the first time". These people were promoted because they had the connections or were able to "ride the wave" of high results without even knowing what caused them. In short it was too easy for too many and they have little awareness of what it takes to run a maturing business.
5. Focus on customer success vs. customer bookings. The culture and incentives are overweight on "sell, ship, and forget". Success and recognition was and is based on that to today. There has been little if any real focus on realized value and customer benefit from their VMware investments as it was always "assumed" if they bought it they wanted it. Once VMware started creating their bundles in 2012 / 2013 without care if the client actually deployed the tech into production and saw value, it created a precedent that bookings outweighed revenues. Comp is still misaligned to this and leaders in the business were successful for stocking orders and bookings as opposed to real client usage and value. That is a huge hurdle to cross if you need / want to transition to saas and subscription where usage and value is the name of the game. Just a legacy leadership incentive matrix at odds with the talk of where the business needs to go.

There are certainly other issues but those are immediate top of mind. As much as BC is likely to strip-mine the IPR and engineering of VMware, there may actually be some benefits from the hatchet job coming in that simplicity and focus on what is needed at the product, commercials, and customer levels should be light years more clear than in this current VMware model. Time will tell but in my view MD is selling because he knows what is needed and didn't want the hassle (legacy?, ability?) of doing it himself, while HT is willing and able. We will all see in the coming months.

There wasn't one point in time that caused them to fail. It was a decades-long descent, starting with the panic sell of the company over a weekend to EMC when Microsoft bought a company doing virtualization of an entirely different architecture.

Because in the end, the majority of the company believed that the path to success was through ESX, rather than to innovate.
Then they panicked and wasted billions of dollars on Pivotal and Heptio, which did nothing but confuse customers even more, since neither company leadership had any idea on how to create a sustainable business or build actual products.

Lack of innovation and not seeing beyond the 4 walls. Not recognizing the need to move to a subscription model. For some reason the company never understood the importance of innovating the licensing model. We had a good run, but missed on key shifts in what the market demanded and here we are. Decisions taken 5 years ago led us to this point.

To be fair, Raghu played a large role in the success of vSphere. Not saying he was the right guy for CEO but be fair. The company went off the rails with Maritz, his MSFT lackeys and the incoherent business strategy they put together. Hard to recover from that without decisive refocusing which Gelsinger never did.

Can't get approval to fix anything if it takes more than two weeks.

Saying "innovative" , "Forward-thinking", and "big picture" every five seconds instead of correctly executing said "innovative" ideas.

They didn't become a hyperscaler. At that tipping point the previous poster mentioned they lacked the vision.

Yes, having an annual concert was the reason we went down, SMH

"10 years ago, VMware was at the tipping point of either becoming the next Apple, or Google or slowly descending into irrelevance, which is what where we are today."

I agree with your sentiment here, but we were never going to be the next Google or Apple. That's not to say our tech wasn't just as if not even more impressive than theirs was, but it was never going to be widespread consumer tech with the resultingly enormous total addressable market.

Well, the fact that VMware was under DELL cash milking it with huge dividend payments didn't help either.

1. Too much DEI focus to the detriment of quality hiring.

2. Being forced to buy Pivotal

3. vCloud Air

4. Raghu's appointment ahead of Sanjay.

VMware failed because it said yes to everything and committed to nothing and anyone who disagreed with either is long gone.

OP is right. 10 years ago, it seemed like VMware will become the next Apple. Unfortunately, we started hiring bad business and technical leaders from that time on who's only job was to suppress anyone who shone brightly than their dim light. You do this for long enough, like a decade, and this is what you get. So unfortunate. It pains me to see this happen to company I love. But it's over now.

Also the insane focus on pronouns and DEI is another reason. It's just absolutely crazy the levels to which they have taken this. Hoc will be cutting all of this one go. We are in the business of creating value for customers. We can keep all of our pronouns and preferences at home.

Diversity originally meant Diversity of Ideas. You'd hire people who were smart but didn't always agree with you. The goal was to come up with new ways of doing things. Then the SJWs got hold of it and turned it into diversity of ethnicity and gender and it all went south. I had one HR women tell me that she wanted to hire 50% women because women where 50% of the population and were underresprented in tech. Most of the women that I know don't want to be in tech and they only talk with computer geeks because we make good money.

Personally, I blame the turtles! Those reptilian ba----ds have been scheming and up to no good for years!

The funny thing about DEI hiring - there is credible research is starting to show the magical & intangible benefits HR claims come from it, are not.... real. Who would've thought that prioritizing race and gender over skills and experience, would produce inferior ideas products and marketing?

Research is also starting to show, that a concerted push towards DEI hiring like what VMware has done, is having negative effects on the business, for the exact reasons the poster below mentioned.

Pure waste!

VMware became a victim of its own success.

We were making more money than we knew what to do with, so we hired all these fluffy people to do fluffy things with no tangible long-term value to the business. This is the problem with wasteful, over-hiring, a lot of people don't appreciate. Not only does the fluffy hire cost a lot to the company in salary and benefits, but then those folks feel the need to accomplish something in their role. So they create pointless training, events, and policies, which not only cost the company enormous amounts of money to organize and create, but then they pull employees away from actual revenue generating activities.

• Taylor Swift concerts on the Palo Alto lawn. Someone prove how this made our products better, or generated more revenue
• Forced DE&I hiring - Someone prove how delaying the hiring of highly-qualified and experienced candidates for literally weeks or months, just to interview a set amount of diverse candidates with little to no experience in the related role, helped make our products better or generate more revenue. Businesses choose technology based on the problems it solves, NOT on who made it. There is nothing wrong with hiring diverse people, but if the pool of qualified candidates is slim to nil, then dragging out the hiring process to prove that with every single hire, prevents the business for accomplishing what it needs to.

Too much nepotism that is unchecked. This leads to bloat and failing up.

Visionaries are rarely rewarded here. Some make, but most have had their ideas mixed with really bad ideas in order to gain "consensus" which is often used just to keep from making hard decisions.

Leadership that has decided (time and again) that narrative and story telling are more important that actual product. You see this in most BUs but EUC is one that it is rampant in. They talk "platform" yet most of the products barely integrate. They talk new ideas and strategies at a VMworld then a year later nothing has changed... BECAUSE THEY WERE TERRIBLE LEADERS when it comes to executing.

Anyone can look good. use the right buzzwords, talk DEI, and seem like a VP at VMware. BUT when it comes down to the actual products stability, quality, integration across products and working together... most of these people (our VPs) couldnt successfully lead their way out of a small one street town with signs pointing the way out.