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Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

reuters.com

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Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#201

Post by hnarn »

amenod wrote: post #199
hnarn wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to Or maybe, just maybe, really big corporations that make software solutions are often really big because their solutions are, if not feature-wise the absolute best, by far the most stable and reliable? If one were to buy your argument, that would be like saying that busi…

Gmail is a market leader only because it is good enough (and at the start it was even better than competition) and because it was free - and still is for some cases. Can't comment on Google Apps, never used them. Otherwise, I'm not sure I would put Google in the mix with Oracle / MS and others. They are firmly non-enterprise, in that it is notoriously difficult to get any support from them, even if you are paying (th…

I don’t have direct experience with administrating Oracle, but my impression is that they make a lot of money from the moats they’ve built: but they would never have been able to build them if the product was garbage to begin with. Sure, nobody would probably pick Oracle today for a new project almost regardless of size, but surely there must have been a point in time when Oracle was simply superior when it came to stability and functionality? If not, their current size really makes no sense, because you can’t build a business on scamming people in the long run.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#202

Post by rr808 »

unabridged wrote: post #52

Enterprise software is such a mystery to me. I can't imagine any company ran by To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly

I work for a regular corp. We have a lot of servers, our annual hardware bill is 8 figures (just for our single project), more than our developer's wages. 100k is a drop.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#203

Post by bsagdiyev »

sbf501 wrote: post #151
buro9 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compliance based stuff... "do you trust this machine to access your network/services/applications and execute these commands?" https://www.crowdstrike.com/cybersecurity-101/endpoint-secur... (the VMWare owned product isn't CrowdStrike, that just had the best SEO page with a clear description. VMWare have Carbon Black which is the other dominant player in this market https://www.vmware.com/uk/products/whats-new/carbon…

That's really interesting. So a company would hire Crowdstrike/VMWare, and say "here's all these endpoints, make sure they are secure"? And then CS/VM would provide the service to manage the assets and their connectivity? Ka-ching. I would not want to spin up an IT team to do all of this if I could hire some experts with concentrated knowledge.

Hit the nail on the head. It's a bit more than that realistically.

I work for CrowdStrike just so any potential bias is out there in the open, but do not speak for them.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#204

Post by AlphaSite »

mbesto wrote: post #121
mysterydip wrote: post #7

"to speed up its expansion into the enterprise software business." Why does a chipmaker want/need to expand into enterprise software? Shouldn't they be expanding to making different chips?

Why not both? There's no reason NOT to get into enterprise software. You have hundreds of sales people selling chipsets to enterprise and you're telling me it would be dumb not to have them increase their attach rate?

Tens of thousands of sales people.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#205

Post by jodrellblank »

unabridged wrote: post #52

Enterprise software is such a mystery to me. I can't imagine any company ran by To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly

> "To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly"

You can see people spending millions of dollars a year to keep from having to deal with Linux as evidence that they are stupid. Or you can see it as evidence that Linux really is that bad. It works both ways.

VMware gives you a thing people can be trained on and certified on, a brand you can hire for and screen resumes on, a consistent environment which behaves in a predictable way that you really can turn employees into replacable cogs. Any helpdesk or admin employee can deal with VMware, any MSP, any tech recruiter, and a lot of training companies. You can get backup systems which "support VMware" and storage which integrates with VMware snapshots, and reporting tools which work with VMware.

It's almost not about the tech at all, it's about how do you build companies on shifting sands? You define interfaces for components which can be plugged together. "VMware" is an API or interface that the business can work to; vendors can say "deploy this OVF to VMware", sales can say to the business "this thing we need works with VMware" or to the customers "we can work with your VMware" or "our offering is trustworthy because we use VMware" and the customer recognises the name. HR can say "we need to hire people who know VMware" and that means something fairly specific to the wider world. "runs on Linux" and "people who know Linux" are wildly, wildly, variable and vague things which could mean "ran a website, minimum wage" or "turns SELinux off to make things run" or "was SRE for FAANG" or "did a PHD in AI for tuning networking stacks in HPC applications but doesn't know anything else".

You make software by defining interfaces and components that can be plugged together to make larger systems. Brands are that, for tech. Like you hire someone who "knows React" not someone who "is a programmer" because that's too vague and is as likely to get you someone who worked on a Java CRUD program or someone who worked on a Python log analyser. Like you hire a "service delivery manager" or a "customer account manager" and not "an employee".

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#206

Post by yobbo »

hnarn wrote: post #198
yobbo wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are now starting careers as Office 365 "officers". From now until retirement, they will champion Office 365 and its successors in all situations, because in effect they will be championing their own CVs. Just like people did with IBM, Oracle, J2EE, and so on. If at one point Google Apps is superior to Office 365 makes no difference. The insight is that the careerists are the effective insider salesmen of enter…

Why can’t multiple things be true at the same time? The idea of product “officers” can be bizarre and counter productive, while that product simultaneously can be one of the best in the market. I’m not saying that O365 is great, I use it at work and I hate it, but enterprise software has always been like this: it’s not enough to be better, you need to be something like 3x better, but if you are it doesn’t matter if y…

The pain occurs because of the symbiosis between technical lock-in and careerists.

If a tech company has achieved both technical and organizational lock-in (or maybe "capture"), specs don't matter.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#208

Post by martypitt »

chrisjc wrote: post #146

Probably an insignificant detail when considering the entire portfolio of subsidiaries and services under VMWare, but I guess there are some pretty notable projects included in this acquisition. Especially from the Pivotal portfolio such as RabbitMQ, GreenPlum, Spring, Hibernate, etc... although I'm sure most here couldn't care less about Spring related projects.

I do, and this was what sprung to my mind.

I feel like Pivotal has been doing a great job lately - especially with Spring. I'd hate to see Broadcomm mess with this, but it feels highly possible.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#209

Post by yobbo »

hnarn wrote: post #201
amenod wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail is a market leader only because it is good enough (and at the start it was even better than competition) and because it was free - and still is for some cases. Can't comment on Google Apps, never used them. Otherwise, I'm not sure I would put Google in the mix with Oracle / MS and others. They are firmly non-enterprise, in that it is notoriously difficult to get any support from them, even if you are paying (th…

I don’t have direct experience with administrating Oracle, but my impression is that they make a lot of money from the moats they’ve built: but they would never have been able to build them if the product was garbage to begin with. Sure, nobody would probably pick Oracle today for a new project almost regardless of size, but surely there must have been a point in time when Oracle was simply superior when it came to s…

> because you can’t build a business on scamming people in the long run.

When switching is effectively impossible, this is what happens.

Oracle has been buying various application companies with installed bases that are difficult to migrate away from. They are essentially buying customers to milk after putting in their enclosed pasture.

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