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Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

reuters.com

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Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#211

Post by filmgirlcw »

yobbo wrote: post #140
jjice wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like a tax for stupidity and laziness I pay a barber to cut my hair. Sure, I could learn how to cut my own hair, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up. I pay a mechanic to fix my car for serious repair. Sure, I could learn how to replace a transmission, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up. If these (and the endless examples of paying profe…

> I pay a barber to cut my hair. Meaningless analogy. Here some other meaningless analogies: Why would anyone ever own a frying pan? Not only do you need to rent a stove, you also need to hire a chef to cook with frying pan, you need a station with chefs that prep ingredients and so on. Just go to a restaurant. You pay a mechanic to fix your car? Why would anyone ever own a car when you can rent a car whenever you ne…

I mean, people do most of those things (the wig analogy is a bit off but people do get weeves and extensions) — not everyone, but I don’t cook, as an example. I own a frying pan, but I don’t know the last time I’ve ever used it. As a general rule, I don’t cook.

And many, many people don’t own a car, not because they can’t afford one but because it makes more sense to rent one or hire a car service when needed. Frankly, my dream scenario is to have enough money to hire a personal driver who is on-demand and at the ready when I need to go out and do things. For plenty of people, that’s anathema. But for me, I don’t like driving (or cooking) and I’d much rather pay someone to do it for me.

The same is true for software. I like tinkering with a lot of my own software, but if I was building my own business, I sure as shit would rather pay for an established company to handle some of the grunt work, rather than hiring dedicated teams that in aggregate would cost a lot of money.

The rise of SaaS and PaaS isn’t just laziness. It’s a recognition that for a lot of people, even developers, we’d rather entrust a lot of the operations and IT work to someone else.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#212

Post by simiones »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #179
lp0_on_fire wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you consider a chef who buys produce from the market as opposed to buying a farm and growing it on their own "stupid and lazy"?

It’s more like being a chef and paying another company to cut up your ingredients for you and cook them. Companies these days just want to specialize in making cool menu designs and marketing and waiting on the three star Michelin review to roll in somehow.

> It’s more like being a chef and paying another company to cut up your ingredients for you and cook them.

That would be like a Hypervisor company paying VMWare to re-distribute ESXi or something.

But a farm company buying VMWare ESXi to run its IT infra instead of using, say, CentOS is exactly like a chef sourcing ingredients instead of growing them herself.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#214

Post by laura2013 »

vkat wrote: post #196

For anyone who doesn't know, VMware has doubled down in open source in the past 3 years, especially Kubernetes. I don't think Broadcom really understands how investment in open source works or for that matter cares. Half of my org of ~500 engineers works on upstream projects. Disclaimer: Current employee of VMware

I can only hope they let VMware operate independently and continue growing like they've done in the past decade.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#215

Post by yobbo »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #211
yobbo wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I pay a barber to cut my hair. Meaningless analogy. Here some other meaningless analogies: Why would anyone ever own a frying pan? Not only do you need to rent a stove, you also need to hire a chef to cook with frying pan, you need a station with chefs that prep ingredients and so on. Just go to a restaurant. You pay a mechanic to fix your car? Why would anyone ever own a car when you can rent a car whenever you ne…

I mean, people do most of those things (the wig analogy is a bit off but people do get weeves and extensions) — not everyone, but I don’t cook, as an example. I own a frying pan, but I don’t know the last time I’ve ever used it. As a general rule, I don’t cook. And many, many people don’t own a car, not because they can’t afford one but because it makes more sense to rent one or hire a car service when needed. Frankl…

> The rise of SaaS and PaaS isn’t just laziness.

My point is that none of the analogies are arguments for (or against) SaaS, or in this case "brand name" enterprise software.

Whenever any of these comically banal analogies are brought out to sell something, the intention always seems to be to suspend critical thinking.

There exists many legitimate arguments, for many things. They never begin with "why would anyone need a frying pan".

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#216

Post by TomVDB »

vkat wrote: post #196

For anyone who doesn't know, VMware has doubled down in open source in the past 3 years, especially Kubernetes. I don't think Broadcom really understands how investment in open source works or for that matter cares. Half of my org of ~500 engineers works on upstream projects. Disclaimer: Current employee of VMware

After being acquired by Avago, Broadcom ceased to be a single company. It’s a conglomerate of entities/BUs that are explicitly asked to NOT work cooperatively, so that each entity can be sold at moment’s notice if it doesn’t deliver the right financial results anymore.

Chances are that the current leadership doesn’t care about how VMware operates, as long as it cuts enough costs to increase metrics that Wall Street considers important.

Expect major cuts in R&D, receptionists, travel expenses, general benefits, and virtually no hiring of college grads or interns. You’ll be on the phone in a queue for hours to get outsourced IT support.

Support of open source should be the least of your worries.

Stock price might go up though…

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#217

Post by yencabulator »

jnovek wrote: post #165
yobbo wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I pay a barber to cut my hair. Meaningless analogy. Here some other meaningless analogies: Why would anyone ever own a frying pan? Not only do you need to rent a stove, you also need to hire a chef to cook with frying pan, you need a station with chefs that prep ingredients and so on. Just go to a restaurant. You pay a mechanic to fix your car? Why would anyone ever own a car when you can rent a car whenever you ne…

I lease a car every four years in part so that I don’t have to deal with the inevitable car repairs that come after that point. For some — but not all — people, that’s a preferable option. For some — but not all — companies, enterprise tech is a preferable option.

I typically own cars 4-10 years old. I'm currently still happy with a 2008 model that has had exactly one non-maintenance, non-upgrade, cost -- which wouldn't even have prevented using it in any way, I just like the emissions system to be as eco-friendly as it can.

"Inevitable repairs after 4 years" is just a delusion, and silly.

Might I suggest you be honest with yourself and say you like the new car feel? Maybe even like it as a status symbol? Don't want to think about what tires to buy to replace worn-out ones?

I'm the opposite. I like having a scuffed-up car (or in this case, jeep), with dogs climbing all over the seats and sand everywhere from going off road. I'd rather use the thing and have fun on the trip.

Even if I drove my jeep off a cliff, called it a total loss, and got nothing back from insurance, I'd lose less money than you lost in 3 years of leasing -- and I've already had the thing longer than that.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#218

Post by caymanjim »

sithadmin wrote: post #67
caymanjim wrote: post #59

I didn't know VMware was still a thing. What do they even do? Who uses any of it?

VMware has the largest on-premises hypervisor footprint by a large margin and sells a zillion other software products to layer on top. Pretty much every large public company has a VMware footprint in their data center, and frequently have their entire on-prem infrastructure built on top of vSphere.

Fair enough. I could have googled it. I live in a bubble of Linux and AWS/other cloud services, so this sort of thing isn't part of my world.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#219

Post by bobo_legos »

laura2013 wrote: post #214
vkat wrote: post #196

For anyone who doesn't know, VMware has doubled down in open source in the past 3 years, especially Kubernetes. I don't think Broadcom really understands how investment in open source works or for that matter cares. Half of my org of ~500 engineers works on upstream projects. Disclaimer: Current employee of VMware

I can only hope they let VMware operate independently and continue growing like they've done in the past decade.

One thing that I always gave Dell/EMC credit for was that they at least outwardly seemed to have left VMware free to their own thing. As opposed to a lot of their other acquisitions that they bastardized in this rush to sell enterprises on everything private cloud. We'll see Broadcom ends up taking the same route.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#220

Post by ghaff »

jnovek wrote: post #158
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

Presuming for a moment that you’re under 40 for the sake of conversation: Have you ever considered the other way around? That is, “What changes with age that would make someone over 40 prefer outsourcing a problem to an enterprise?” It’s possible that this trend is a result of a different perspective.

Certainly part of it is that, as you have been around longer and maybe moved higher up, you probably better appreciate how expensive it really is to have "just" a small team doing something that could largely be outsourced. You have the developers of course, their benefits, their manager's salary and benefits and some small slice of attention up the management chain and across other functional groups like HR. And it's just one more distraction from the things that actually matter to running the business.
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