VMware to 'axe 900 jobs'

"The only way for them to survive the brunt of Wall Street is to cut highest expense - employees"

http://dilbert.com/strip/1993-03-03

Well colour me shocked. I was convinced (by their marketing) that VMware could easily sustain growth rates in a shrinking sector with lower cost/free options from competitors which do everything theirs do. I was also convinced that in the world of cloud computing that the VMware virtual colo service would compete with the full featured clouds offered by the real cloud vendors. And ninthly, I was convinced that the $10k/cpu virtual networking would sell to even the smallest customers despite their complete lack of requirement for dynamic networking and "Micro-segmentation" <cough> local firewall < cough>.

Oh, wait, now I think about it I've been laughing at them for several years for these very reasons and wondering when the penny (stock) would drop...

Photon had better be awesome.

Truly, I'm shocked mcShockington..

Time was when VMware was unique and revolutionary - no longer. There was no reasonably priced way of learning their software last time I looked, the free versions have become progressively more cut down, and competitors have caught up.

It's nice that they have features such as copying Workstation VMs up to an ESX cloud, and that i.e. DirectX/OpenGL support has improved, but there's been no return of the VM debugging feature that sort of let you debug backwards in time, that got dropped as it was 'too hard' to get it working properly.

Well, other people have managed the less hard items now, so it's only the too hard stuff that's left. The 'too hard' items that would actually sell product.

Oh no

Interesting to see what the VMware fanboys make of this treason

Not the higest paid

It was announced internally today. I don't think it was the higest paid at all that was targeted, it was "across the board", although some locations were hit harder than others.

I get what the posters above are saying but the big money is from big enterprise for them, not small shops. Question is can they change quickly enough to get these big enterprises to go to them for more of the stack (networking and storage).

That said big business moves verrrrry slowly. I know there are some big places on esx4 still :)

Anon cause I don't know how much info is public yet

Is anyone really surprised?

Many moons ago VMware was a great company with some brilliant engineering folks who were more than happy to tackle hard problems. Fast forward to today (well, about 2009 actually) and they had transformed into a marketing machine that placed more value on spin and regular release cycles than delivering value to their customers.

"You want something difficult delivered? Sorry- we can't possibly get that done by the next Wall St reporting period so we're not going to do it."

Aside from that, there is no real strategy that customers are able to pin their futures on. (vSphere. No wait- vCloud Director. Scratch that it's DynamicOps/VCAC/VRA).

What customer in their right mind would think of investing big $$ integrating the rest of their IT with such a shifting goalpost?

The sad thing is that it's the guys who know their shit (engineers, architects) who will be shafted and the clueless twonks in product manglement will likely get promoted.