Thread regarding VMware layoffs

The comment about Pat not being disciplined with a high R&D budget should be clarified - we used to brag about how much we put into that at EMC as well, but most of it was attempting to integrate acquired stuff and increased support engineering…it wasn’t for innovation. What he did was part of the EMC 101 playbook that Joe was driving from the mothership.

Pat was not a disciplined CEO, he spent too much on science projects. 20% of VMware revenue spend on R&D, is the highest of anyone. He was also more into himself and his Glassdoor ratings, than what was best for VMware. He always wanted to be the CEO of Intel, over VMware. The moment he got the Intel Job, he ditched VMware and ran there. He tried to stay on the VMware Board, but when he poached Greg Lavander to Intel, likely the Board asked him to leave. Lets see how he does at Intel, but even there he seems more interested in kissing up to Biden for government money, than turning around Intel.

I certainly agree that the pedal tone of being 85% owned from the start was not a way to run a public company.

The Pivotal acquisition was likely good to avoid bigger losses down the road - the main owners were again just a handful and just a year after heptio was acquired. I doubt VMware’s position in the k8s space would be any different if Pivotal wasn’t acquired, maybe they just would have failed faster. The heptio nerds were not product people either, they cached in on their invention, so good for them, but they were not cut out to be leaders of enterprise products.

The tolerance for bad managerial practices across the board, right down the the mid level managers, seems to be the root cause of headcount bloat and inability to innovate despite any specific acquisition imho.

A review by any competent Managment firm such as Accenture, Deloitte, etc would have revealed many flaws and vmware could have righted itself, but that wasn’t in executive management’s DNA it seems to me.

All moot, but makes for an interesting autopsy , I mean, business case study.

I'm getting the feeling that Pat might not've been a very good CEO?

No decision can come close to being as catastrophic as acquiring Pivotal. $3B for a dead company that was 3 quarters from being bankrupt. And that completely derailed all the work that had been done after the Heptio acquisition to create a viable Kubernetes product. 30 months after that disasterous Pivotal acquisition the Tanzu products are still a laughing stock. The Kubernetes founders have taken their money and left the sinking ship.

The worst decision by Pat was VCloudAir. Why did he waste many years doing that? We should have been all over AWS, or doing containers, instead of wasting money trying to be a public cloud. All that has led to where we are today - a legacy, fallen, once-great company.