Bain is driving this company

Great companies fail when they decide to rest on their laurels, start to fail and then bring in consultants to 'help'. That's why we're in the plight we're seeing now. Bain is driving this company, not our ELT. If Bain says 'jump', the ELT asks 'how high?'.

Instead of leveraging what EMC brought to the table, the focus has been on cutting costs to the bone and in so doing, the decision was made to 'serverfy' almost every offering. This has led to customers looking at essentially the same server box, just with a different bezel on it and software development either outsourced or sold to a 3rd party. So we've now ended up with low product margins and low software quality. Not a recipe for success to say the least. Our competitors love what we're doing. It helps them sell more.

Anyone on the ELT team with a spine would have told Bain and MD to not sell VMware. You want money, fine, spin it out as a wholly owned subsidiary so we could continue to rake in the profits and enjoy the tight engineering relationship we had. But, no, MD and Silverlake decided they wanted those billions, so we sold the golden goose to a company known for cooking that fowl to generate every dollar possible. As a result, we're now just another 3rd party vendor using VMware in some of our products, while customers decide to flee to another virtualization platform to save money.

As for the long awaited 'PC refresh cycle', don't hold your breath. With the vast majority of corporate PCs being able to run Win11 now (albeit w/o that magical CoPilot key), and tariffs looming, companies are gonna sit on their financial hands and keep those older PCs running as long as they can to save money.

I wish I could be optimistic, but I've worked at other tech companies that couldn't figure out how to 'save their way to prosperity' and I left before they were sold for pennies on the dollar because the day-to-day misery becomes overwhelming and here I am again, living out the real-life 'Survivor' game, trying to do the jobs of my former coworkers as well as my own...

An excellent post by @fz+1jsc8xfsq.

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Does Bain own a substantial part of Dell?

Just the ba--s.

Stop thinking they care about product and realize this is about Michael and Silver Lake making more money.

Michael made 60B in the VMware spin off and subsequent sell, and he's now the largest individual stakeholder in Broadcom. All this while being able to keep $20B of debt on Dell Technologies' books.

Dell Technologies is Michael Dell's personal financial shelter in the form of a Fortune 50 company.

And if you think we're struggling, the board approved a $10B stock buy back end of last year.

BS-meter was sky-rocketing when they were claiming the VMWare sale would have benefitted both Dell and the same VMWare solution itself.
I don't think any person with a grain of intelligence could fall for that.

you lost me at "instead of leveraging what EMC brought to the table" - the company was bought out because it was failing

VMWare is dead because Broadcom ki-led it

Our internal products that currently use VMWare are starting to look at alternatives.

I haven't seen any large shops switching to Proxmox but OpenShift and Nutanix are going to take VMware market share. Until Proxmox comes out with a better enterprise support model, people are going to be risk averse about making that jump.

They also need to work on their version of vmotion with CEPH. It's just clunky and slow compared to vmotion. Anyone that's been in the industry for more than a few years is well aware about what Bcom does when they buy companies.

As a tech support agent, I can say that VMware is dead. I've talked to many of my customers, and they no longer want anything to do with this platform, especially after Broadcom increased prices tenfold for some companies. This also prompted many to break away from Dell, as they had previously been purchasing both the products and the servers from a single source—a win-win situation that has now collapsed.

Not only is VMware dead, but so are other products that were offering a solution with VMware. What might have seemed like a good financial opportunity for Dell now appears, in my eyes, to be a significant financial loss and a huge loss of prestige and confidence from our customers (some of my customers basically said they are angry at Dell and they won't forgive them). Most of my customers are migrating to Proxmox; they don’t even want to consider Microsoft Hyper-V anymore, as trust in large IT corporations continues to erode. From small businesses to larger enterprises, many have already moved on. Perhaps the top 15% still remain with Broadcom, but even they are voicing frustrations—particularly about the quality of support, which is seen as neither top-notch nor as proactive as VMware once was. Honestly Broadcom is the worse company to do business with.

As for Bain, I honestly don’t know what they’re doing. What I do see is that we’re losing more and more employees each day, and that’s not good for our customers. Our clients don’t want anything to do with AI; they want to speak with real people—specifically those based in the USA—when they encounter problems. Offering outsourced support in other countries sends the message that the company values cost-cutting over customer service, and it reflects poorly on the business model as a whole.

Does Bain own a substantial part of Dell?

Thread regarding Dell Inc. layoffs

Bain is driving this company

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