
VMware Confirms Layoffs as It Prepares for Dell Acquisition - walterclifford
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/26/vmware-confirms-layoffs-in-earnings-statement-as-it-prepares-for-dell-acquisition/
======
hkmurakami
Inflated and leveraged equity assets seem to be driving a M&A spree. This
isn't limited to domestic affairs in scope, as Chinese companies with high
earning multiples are leveraging their equity to buy out assets abroad (ex:
one such company bough a GE business unit for ~$2b).

Ee should expect more such events to come. I wonder how much of the Yahoo!
Workforce will be laid off once they spin off their core assets.

~~~
chdhchchf
Found a post on another website today that sums up the developing economic
landscape quite well (edited to be more appropriate for HN):

>The [austerity/ free market advocates] need to quit [complain]ing and just
accept that we need to stimulate the demand side of the economy. The US and
Europe are currently headed down the same course that Japan went down, and
they're stuck in an inescapable stagnation. We've implemented the same QE and
austerity policies that they did years before us, and now we're beginning to
experience the same stagnation and gradual decline they did. Just like Japan
we're propping up large, [poorly managed], decaying businesses at the expense
of everything else in our economy, all while starving our economy's consumers
of money.

>We've printed tons of money to fund big business, and cut back on social
services so businesses won't have to pay as many taxes, and yet we only have a
worsening economy to show for it. Unless you want the stock market to be the
only segment of the economy that doesn't collapse, quit [explative]
complaining and just hand people money.

~~~
Altay-
Your blurb seems to contradict it self. It claims we need stimulus then it
says the West & Japan tried this already and it hasn't worked.

Maybe we need to allow the free market to function. Who cares if house prices
drom from $250,000 -> $50,000 and the Dow from 16,000 -> 3,000? They will
eventually be snapped up by someone at some price, thus fulfilling 'demand.'

So much debt will be wiped out through defaults in this process as well, it
will be great for the average person who will finally be able to afford to
meaningfully participate in the investment world. Dividends yields of 2-6%
mean nothing to a small time investor, but 20% is something that we could very
well see in a liquidation market.

~~~
bitL
You need perpetual growth because all math models used in financial industry
are based on perpetual exponential growth - imagine insurance companies,
profitability, attractiveness of financial services, hedging etc. is based on
the assumption the amount of wealth (money) increases in time. This is
nowadays done basically with inflation only (the profits in trading are more-
less inflation these days).

Now somebody said that the humanity's greatest shortcoming is the inability to
understand exponential function...

~~~
Relys
This has always confused me. Now, I'm not an economist (I have a M.S. in
CompSci and do security research), but isn't the correct model for growth in a
majority of businesses sigmoidal as opposed to purely exponential?

For example, let's imagine a company that sells toasters. At some point
they're going to reach peak market saturation where everyone in the world has
a toaster. Now during this process right when growth in it's peak we see an
almost ethereal phenomenon that capitalism delivers. We see the most optimized
form of an idea materialize which everyone can benefit from and gain wealth.
Wealth in this case would be owning a toaster in it's most optimal form
according to the laws of physics and current engineering processes.

The problem is that once this epoch takes place the projected exponential
growth for the business just vanishes. Instead we see gradual decline until
the new market cap (replacing broken toasters etc.) is reached and an thus an
equilibrium in the market is reached. During this process we see the nasty
side of capitalism as the toaster company fights tooth and nail to prevent
this inevitable conclusion. We see monopolization, deliberate weakening of the
integrity of the product to increase time to EOL (which wreaks havoc on the
environment), absurd patenting and copyrighting, digital rights management,
lobbying and bailouts. This not only hurts the customer, but the economy as a
whole as our political system is set up to encourage this type of behavior.

Now, one of the main themes I'm seeing in this discussion is the problem of
demand. It seems like a lot of "things" that our economy has relied on
consumers purchasing has hit this market saturation point and is being limited
by technological advancement.

I think that we are at a point where we need to change our financial structure
to one that helps create demand. With the minimum federal wage remaining
relatively stagnant for the past few decades along with more and more low
level jobs being replaced by automation people simply don't have the money to
buy things let alone make investments. The only real solution I see is a push
for a universal minimal income. But then again, what do I know? Like I said,
I'm not an economist..

------
mgarfias
A little late. I got the call yesterday

~~~
thewarrior
Are there more layoffs than usual now or am I just imagining things ?

~~~
jeffjose
What departments/roles are these targeted at? Are they more support roles -
HR/Training/IT or are they more engineering/products - engineers, PMs etc?

~~~
awalton
Well, for starters...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10976579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10976579)

~~~
venomsnake
That is sad. Desktop virtualization is incredibly useful. And vmware are the
only one that can pull off a macos virtualization in windows host decently so
far.

But workstation was for long left on the backburner - we haven't had there a
lot of killer features since '07 probably. So I guess it is not a new
decision.

Clarification: I mean that workstation was deprioritized by corporate, not by
the team that worked on it.

~~~
chipx86
Workstation was heavily developed up until, well, yesterday really.

I personally spent 2 years of my life, starting in 2008, bringing Unity to
Workstation on Linux and making it work with every combination of Linux and
Windows I could throw at it. That work was continued by a teammate for several
years.

I spent 3 years rewriting most of the foundation, UI, and server
infrastructure for Workstation 8, bringing the ability to connect to remote
VMware ESXi/vSphere servers, along with the server component of Workstation 8.
This work allowed VMs to be hosted on any server and accessed from any other
server, and allowed VMs to be pushed between servers. 3 solid years on this
feature alone, given just how much was needed to make that happen.

In the same release, we replaced the old Teams feature (a single feature that
provided a multi-VM UI along with software-defined networking segments) with a
series of more independent, more useful features. These were just a couple of
the major features released in Workstation 8, and with all this came cleanup
in the UI to keep the experience sane, not bloated.

That came out in 2011.

Workstation 9, released in 2012, came with a web-based UI for interacting with
VMs called WSX (a feature I dedicated a bit over a year to). It also added UI
refinement for the features that come out in Workstation 8, more remote VM
support, hardware improvements (USB 3, Hyper-V, OpenGL for Linux VMs,
nested/Inception-like VMs), locked down virtual machines for IT, and probably
more that I can't remember.

Workstation 10 followed that a year later, and brought guest hardware support
for tablets, enhancements for Windows 8 hosts, more remote VM improvements,
better command line automation for remote-controlling/creating VMs, and a
bunch of other things. UI-wise, it was a smaller release, but it did a lot for
the hardware support.

I left around this time to focus on Review Board
([https://www.reviewboard.org/](https://www.reviewboard.org/)) full-time.

Since then, they released 2 major versions: Workstation 11 and 12. From what I
can tell, these were largely about hardware improvements and performance
improvements, less about major UI changes, but there's a lot that has to
happen for these improvements. Hardware improvements are crucial to keeping
the VMs useful in many situations. Performance was also a focus. While
building these releases, the team was also busy helping out the View team by
helping them consume bits of the Workstation/Fusion codebase. They also begun
development of AppCatalyst and Flex.

There's also work that happened on Player, Ace, and other things, all
throughout.

So that's a lot of killer features in my opinion :) I barely scratched the
surface of 8, and didn't go into all the stuff we did in 6 and 7.

We were all very proud of the product, and often spent our free time working
on it. I should point out, this was _not_ a large team by any means. It was an
amazing team, though. A family. One that will survive these layoffs, one way
or another.

~~~
venomsnake
For me killer features would have been -PCI pass trough, higher and better
performing 3d driver, better work with hardware disks - that feature never
quite worked on Windows at least. Remote/connect/management and so on - they
are nice to have.

These features may have been prohibited by corporate management for some
reason since ESXi have passtrough. And yeah - I view it from strong power
user/developer/gaming angle, not sysadmin.

~~~
chipx86
Hmm, I don't think management really ever forbid us from doing anything. I'll
have to think about that, but that's not my recollection. It's more that we
had a lot of customers in different segments wanting different things, and our
own list of what we thought would make a good release, and only so much time
and personnel to make things happen :)

A teammate just told us he's bummed he didn't have just a bit longer to work
on Workstation, because he had a few things left he wanted to fix and rework
for the next release. Our personal todo lists were so long, we could have
filled another 10 releases... Shame we didn't have that opportunity.

------
0xFFC
I am so curious why dell is buying EMC/VMware. What position/product do they
hope to achieve ?

~~~
pfarnsworth
They would own the datacenter, theoretically. People could come to Dell, and
Dell would supply all of the hardware, from the storage to the virtualization
to the servers. With VMWare owning Nicira, I guess that also including the
virtual networking as well. It could be a compelling story, except IBM has
already talked about how datacenter sales have dropped, so the US at least is
probably overcapacity at this point. Bad timing, but not unexpected for a
company like Dell, some this knuckle-headed is expected more from HP.

The funny thing is, virtualization is dying. All of the large private
datacenters these days are non-virtualized bare metal on commodity hardware.
Virtualization is an unnecessary overhead when it comes to datacenters these
days. And enterprise storage is also not "web scale" since it's faster to
shard data across 100k servers than have a single huge database with a single
point of failure.

~~~
awalton
> The funny thing is, virtualization is dying. All of the large private
> datacenters these days are non-virtualized bare metal on commodity hardware.

Well, you sound like a Google employee, because that's pretty much their party
line.

Of course, reality doesn't mesh up with that when you step out and look at
other data centers.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
This is a very, very wrong, and unnecessarily harsh and personal in its
wrongness, comment. The person you are replying to is dead on and I suspect
you are conflating "I support a lot of virt environments in my profession"
with the state of the industry.

At scale, in prod, virt is legacy. Aside from Linode where I obviously ran
virt, the only virt I've ever touched in private datacenters is relegated to
labs or testing farms. We have a lot of tech, both from supercomputing and the
new valley stuff which is inexplicably rewriting all of that, that makes
virtualization completely unnecessary outside of a multitenant situation with
separate paying customers and security domains. Even there multiple vendors
are working on it, notably Intel, who is pushing VT-x into containers with
multiple efforts.

Don't be so confident to talk about reality, because yours is very different
from mine. The original poster was unguarded with their claim but in terms of
winds of the industry, they couldn't be more correct, and if you think I'm
wrong you're on the wrong side of the shift that is coming, nigh already here.

Example: We bought space in Virginia for Foursquare and didn't deploy a single
byte of virt. My current employer has dozens of facilities and virt is a lab
thing. No prod, anywhere, across dozens of products and lines and
organizations, uses virt. Google doesn't, right you are. Nor does Twitter, who
is deep into Mesos (same for everyone who is also deep into Mesos or its many
friends).

You might scoff and say well, my CIO says, and you'd be correct today, but the
state of the art for resource utilization at scale moved away from virt
because we figured out that running full operating systems next to each other
as a bandaid for bad CD and provisioning and resource allocation stories is a
shitload of overhead for zero gain. There is absolutely nothing that virt
gives you, aside from a perf hit and unpredictable low-level behavior (some of
us care about cache lines and context switches), which cannot be implemented
with tooling atop bare metal platforms. Virt makes your hot aisle hotter so
you don't have to figure out bare metal provisioning. You should care about
that, then figure it out. It's not hard.

If you are strongly convinced that I'm wrong, much like your neighbor posters,
the state of the art simply hasn't made it to you yet. Sorry. You should be
willing to consider, however, instead of sniping at change like your tone will
keep it at bay. There is a lot of denial in this thread, and it's trivial to
deduce why that is.

~~~
awalton
> This is a very, very wrong, and unnecessarily harsh and personal in its
> wrongness, comment.

In other words, you are ~very~ (edit:) Exceptionally offended that your
opinion is different than mine from your experience, whereas most of the
paperwork on the industry as a whole does not agree with your experience.

I get that you're mad, but you should take your emotions out of the equation
and look at the numbers published by literally every industry analyst.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
No. Your quote does not support your rewording in the slightest. You are
interpreting me as angry and offended because it makes dismissing me easier,
and because it is mirroring your own feelings, for what it's worth. It's
completely irrelevant, but I am not malcontent at all even despite your
downvoting me for a well-argued counterpoint.

Perhaps it is not me who should step back and reevaluate.

Part of the problem here is a lack of specificity on the industry. Since you
invoked analysts, Gartner and the typical HN view of "industry" are wildly
different, but I would posit what happens in what we typically call the
"industry" is in the pipeline for the Gartner side in about a decade. However,
tickers I would normally put in the Gartner/CIO bucket are aligning with me on
this, more than you'd expect. Even Manhattan finance.

And yes, I am aware of CAGR forecasts for virt, but a big driver of the
market's growth is expansion of virt deployment footholds thanks in no small
part to momentum fueled by opinions like yours. There is also an incentive to
sell virt by hardware and procurement vendors, because you need more fleet to
do the same work under virt, unconditionally. The market will level off
because fewer new projects and companies are reaching for virt as evidenced
by, yes, Google, and half the other household names in the valley.

Thought exercise: Google published Dataflow out of their work on streaming
architecture and said they are moving on from MapReduce (for the most part).
If you got research that says the Hadoop market is growing, wouldn't you look
at it objectively in context since the very organization who defined the
technology has moved on from it? Market research and analysis often lacks
frontline context, much as it does here.

~~~
jamespo
How about some references, all I see are some assertions being thrown out
there?

------
jordigh
I wonder if the GPL lawsuit had anything to do with this? I guess it's not a
good sign when a company will not fulfill its GPL obligations.

[https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vmware-
lawsuit...](https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-
faq.html)

------
raverbashing
The first version of VMWare server was great

Then apparently version 2.0 was handed for the Java and XML fetichists to be
developed and it was a huge bloated mess. It worked, but badly.

It looked like they knew what they were doing at first, but today we have
virtualization services built into the processors and in the OS, making things
easier

~~~
nailer
The founders (who were married) left the company, the staff went to other
startups: there's a few at ElasticBox and some went to Microsoft IIRC.

They 'won' virtualisation, but then virtualisation changed to 'cloud' and they
never hung on.

------
leejoramo
On the Mac, I will be looking into Veertu and xhyve to replace Fusion.

[http://veertu.com](http://veertu.com)

[https://github.com/mist64/xhyve](https://github.com/mist64/xhyve)

~~~
izacus
Can they boot the bootcamp partition?

~~~
leejoramo
No, I think that only VMWare Fusion and Parallels offer the ability to use a
bootcamp partition to boot.

------
dogma1138
Ouch I have a friend that works for VMWare (didn't lose his job, well yet) but
he was complaining that the restricted stocks he was getting (and well paying
for because it's under the Employee Stock Purchase Plan) lost 60% of it's
value already. Unlike stock options there isn't a guaranteed buyback price you
just get the stock at 15% discount based on the market value at either the
beginning or the end of the ESPP purchase cycle (the lowest of the 2) so while
he hasn't lost actual money yet he most likely will get stuck with quite a bit
of stock which might be impossible to offload and very well be worthless by
the end of the ESPP.

~~~
frostmatthew
> he most likely will get stuck with quite a bit of stock which might be
> impossible to offload and very well be worthless by the end of the ESPP

Neither of those are possible. The _worst_ case scenario is a 15% return on
your money, even if the stock does _nothing_ but tank over the entire period.
You purchase the stock at a 15% discount at the lower of the price at either
the beginning or end of the period.

If the stock was at $100 at the beginning and $120 at the end and you put in
$1000 you would get 11.7 shares of VMW stock (purchased at $85 each) with a
current market value of $1411, you can sell that on the open market the next
day for a 41% return.

Likewise if you put in $1000 and the stock went from $100 to $80 over the
period you would get 14.7 shares (purchased at $68) with a market value of
$1176, a 17% return. It doesn't matter how much the stock goes down, you're
still buying a thousand dollars worth of stock at 15% less than market value,
even if the stock went from $100 to $10 you'd buy 117.6 shares for $8.5 (which
would be worth $1176 at $10 a share).

~~~
FullyFunctional
Factually false. I know people who lost money on ESP, granted it's rare. There
is a non-zero delay between determining purchase price and when you can
actually sell it. Stocks can and have fallen more than 15% in this window.

~~~
frostmatthew
> Stocks can and have fallen more than 15% in this window.

Possible, but not common or likely. The shares are granted at the end of one
trading day (which will be the close of that day if that's lower than at the
beginning of the period) and are available for sell the next trading day. e.g.
my last ESPP grant was on a Friday and I sold my shares at the open on the
following Monday.

So for someone to _lose_ money through the ESPP the stock a) would need to be
lower at the end of the period then the beginning and b) drop 15% at the open.
Let's say such a move happens once a year to the average stock, there are
about 250 trading days in a year so you have a 0.4% chance of that happening.
(realistically it's probably even lower than that since drastic moves like
opening down 15% are much more likely to occur following an earnings
announcement than on an average day and ESPP grants and earnings aren't
aligned)

------
plg
for VMs on a personal computer, is there any reason to use VMWare over
Virtualbox?

~~~
arca_vorago
Mostly serial or usb interface speed and driver issues when running windows
hosts. Virtualbox is certainly getting better and better in that regard
though.

There is also better gpu support from anedotal experience.

~~~
i336_
Related question: What about VMware/VirtualBox vs qemu-kvm?

Obviously its UI etc is much more raw - I'm curious how it compares
performancewise.

------
jacquesm
Missed opportunity for HP.

~~~
Swannie
Maybe, but they have their own storage lines, and have been investing heavily
in OpenStack.

HPE may have been free'd from some restrictions, but I think many would have
drawn HP-EDS-Compaq-Digital comparisons, and rightly so.

------
boynamedsue
The notion of Dell acquiring EMC (and VMW as a result) is a little misleading.

This is private equity acquiring EMC because that was the company's last
resort and it should color one's perspective appropriately.

------
miesman
vScrew 1.0

------
asfaf244
Good news for Ericom?

------
jakeogh
Why use vmware's stack over proxmox?

