Comment by kjackson2012 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kjackson2012 | Hacker News Reader

I shorted VMW just before the close today via puts. It was only 2 contracts and the strike price was at $90. I was going to bet more, I usually go in a position with 10 contracts, but I have some financial obligations coming up so I didn't want to risk too much.

I have a few friends that work there. They are happy, but they say that the company lacks any sense of urgency. After Maritz left and more recently Steve Herrod, there seems to be a dearth of really brilliant and inspirational people in the top positions. A lot of great engineers were lost after the 4 year post-IPO options expiration came due last year. As well, there is a lot of middle management, and lots of politics, and apparently lots of fat-cat principal engineers that stick around and do not very much.

All of this spells a recipe for stagnation. The debacle over the last year or so with licensing only cemented the idea that ESX is expensive, and Hyper-V is getting to "good enough" status.

I deal with them as a customer and I will tell you that everything you say is exactly the way their customers see it. We're begging to find a reason to move the rest of our stuff off VMWare. Their technology is dull and pedestrian compared to what some vendors are bringing in. They are very good at what they do but every time I talk to a person in the company it just feels like they are in maintenance mode and are bored with their own products.

What are the things you're migrating to ? I'm voting for VirtualBox, but I guess you could go with kvm which has slightly better performance in my experience.

Care to share where you're moving to ?

VirtualBox is very very slow on my PC, VMware player is faster.

The majority of their customers are corporate customers running ESX/ESXi, the only thing you could switch to would be Hyper-V.

oVirt is also an option, but your point that VMWare did not collect $1.3B from people wanting to try out Ubuntu on their laptops stands.

(Disclosure: I am not unbiased)

This may be a dumb question ... but why would you limit yourself to that option ?

VMWare images can be imported onto every virtualization system on the planet. Virtualbox, Qemu, KVM, even Bochs can import VMWare images ...

What is the limiting factor ?

I expected posts like this to come flooding in. Posts by people who think virtualisation starts and ends with your efforts to get Ubuntu or Windows running in Virtualbox. Posts by people who have no idea what virtualisation in the enterprise is.

This post should be on 'shit HN says' but without the context it won't make any sense.

well, what is virtualization in the enterprise? would you care to enlighten the rest of us?

Basically a single physical server running 10's to 100's of virtualized servers. With all the management challenges that entails.

I've seen this but with farms / clusters of hundreds of servers.

Somewhat different to some home user sticking Ubuntu on his virtualbox....

We're closer to the tens end, luckily. I think we run about 4 dozen servers total.

> As well, there is a lot of middle management, and lots of politics, and apparently lots of fat-cat principal engineers that stick around and do not very much.

With the firings-by-another-name coming up, expect the politics to get nastier. We'll see the middle managers who don't do very much to turn on the ones that do, leaving an even greater dearth of brilliant coders.

Go figure; company goes public, company goes stagnant. Seems like a common theme in the industry.

Counting the EMC years, VMWare has been public for more than half its existence. By your assessment, it's been stagnant since before most people even heard of it.

Remove the EMC years then...

I firmly believe that as any group of people gets larger, they get collectively slower and collectively stupider. Sure you can try to mitigate the rate at which it happens, but it always seems to happen.

but it makes sense. The innovation a company does is related to the average capability of the company (as it must, since its people who are innovating, and last i checked, innovation isn't some standard process like flipping burgers that can be replicated with anyone).

As the size of a company grows the average capability must tend towards the average of the population. I must say that can't be very high, and so you see the results here. Some companies have strict hiring standards, but i think eventually, pressure to hire more people end up costing them the quality.

Not sure if there is a solution, other than to keep the working unit tiny and independent.

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