Raghu’s email today showed again how much VMware meant to him. I see lot of negativity around Raghu but the one who ruined VMware is Dell. Fortunes of VMware turned once Dell brought EMC. It was all about how to save Dell by using VMWare as a collateral. Be it milking insane dividends or dumping Pivotal and finally selling VMW, Dell not only ki-led VMware but also ruined future of tech in infra space. Sad that I can’t see VMWare sign board on the office anymore. I wish the very worst to Dell.
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Dell and Silverlake didnt help, but the main reason VMW is in the sh----r is because of years of failed strategies, investments and acquisitions by the ELT.
VMW lost everything when they caved to EMC back in 2004. Diane Greene got scared because she had been down that road before ala Microsoft Windows Media player - her first company developed the streaming technology which then MSFT stripped the guts out of the product and then kept just the streaming bit. Hence why when MSFT came calling to buy VMW Diane said no. MSFT knew the threat of VMW back then in terms of OS relevance decline, so they went and bought Parallels which is now Hyper-V. What Diane did was align with Compaq which was smart but then she got scared of all of the big companies floating around her demanding a piece of the action, so when Joe Tucci came calling and offered "autonomy" under their wing, she grabbed it. She should have stuck to her g-ns and just kept hanging on with Compaq because that would have given them new life so no HP merger, and everyone then was buying Proliant servers anyway. Dell back then was just a box shifter with no services or Enterprise penetration. They got both getting EMC+VMW.
I know it's easy to say what could have been now, but I saw it happen in real time and we questioned by Diane just didn't stick it out solo. The worst thing that happened was when Tucci brought in that douchebag Alan Fudge as President, he lasted a year until Diane found out he was having secret meetings with Tucci behind her back so she fired his a-s. Other key flubs in the early days - Oracle - ol' Larry said that if VMW simply gave them internal NFR licenses then they would give full support for Oracle on VMW, well Diane wanted them to pay like everyone else and I get the revenue angle but this was 2005\6 and Oracle was super strong. We wasted years of support/licensing issues all due to Oracle, same with the whole MSFT support in the early days - freaking Balmer didn't want to support VMW so customers were hesitant to deploy in production. Like I said I get the pressures she was on in the early days, as our main goal back then was getting customers to run VM's in production. If she simply just road it out solo, VMW would have become a completely different company vs being bought by a storage company with wise-guy ties from Boston, who then is bought by a Texan who is the king of the transactional sale.
Most of the Chinese capital in these companies was transferred to CCP and the deal was approved. This is what is happening now. Everything is being pulled back into the party.
The common thread is Silverlake. All are Silverlake companies. Including Alibaba and ANT financial. Probably all owned by CCP. Dell Broadcom EMC VMware Symantec.
All the dollars sent to China for importing everything comes back and buys up assets in the USA.
Mostly everyone is working for Chinese capital.
You can't become rich by importing everything. Mostly the value add in US is financialization and securitization of the entire economy. Tech also is mostly supporting this excess financialization.
Mostly China wants to assert its dominance now and USA is not able to accept the reality. This will cause more dangerous wars. We are looking at the next world war. Transition is never peaceful.
Raghu's emails yesterday and today sound absolutely gleeful. Never has he been more positive about VMware now that he's leaving with his $$$$$
F**K MD and Silverlake.
- Dell had to sell VMware to generate cash and keep his backers (Silverlake) happy.
Pretty sure PatG saw how things were going and jumped ship to Intel. Leaving MD as chairman and unctuous yes man Raghu in charge.
Downhill all the way since then.
When VMW went bad dates back to before Dell. The alliance between VMW and EMC served to hold VMW back from innovating to keep ahead of customer needs and instead focus on synergies around EMC and SAN storage. VMW and EMC both were able to make money hand over fist, but at the cost of customer relevance as cloud emerged to fundamentally change the whole model. No more were customers needing to be experts in data-center construction/operations and the service layer that rides on top. Make those problems AMZNs GOOGS, or MSFTSs. VMW was wonderful in its day...but the sun has set a long while ago...you are just seeing the fleeting twilight of what once was.
If you're going to throw Michael Dell under the bus for this fiasco, then at least mention how Siler Lake Partners were complicit in ensuring that VMW cash flow was siphoned off and diverted into a few people's bank accounts. Give credit where it's due.
Meanwhile, VMW shareholders were duped into believing that the deal was progress.
Meant to his bank account with 59m added to it. That's how much people are worth to him.
OP - agree. Having said that, Raghu, please just go away. No one cares about what you have to say nor about your feelings. Take your $50M and disappear.