random memes }

VMware is doomed

As a developer, I was an early VMware Workstation customer. Once, VMware was the best/only outfit going for virtualization, and as desktop PCs grew past 1GB of memory, virtual machines became a useful developer tool.

Until VMware Workstation became unreliable. Fair enough. The money is in the "Enterprise" products, not stuff for developers. I switched from VMware to VirtualBox, for my purpose.

Wind forwards a few years. Hired by a company that owns VMware.

Bit odd.

VMware took a page from the late 1990's Microsoft book. Lots of half-baked ideas, that did not go anywhere. A focus on new features, but not on quality. Rather a lot of crap software released.

Add in the cloud.

Developers started building tools for the cloud. For good reason. The cloud makes a lot of sense.

But VMware was not a target.

At the abstract, this is all about hosting virtual machines. In the abstract, VMware should be as good a target as any other.

Years ago, the development community simply walked away from VMware.

More recently, VMware tried to re-brand as a "cloud software" company. They are not (almost giggled). You could make a software-for-the-cloud checklist. VMware pretty much fails the entire list. (Had more than usual occasion to visit this topic.)

The future for developers and virtual machines is OpenStack (private cloud), and AWS/Google (public cloud). Developers simply no longer care about VMware.

VMware's future is legacy business. Ask IBM how the mainframe market is working.