I really enjoyed reading this latest FUD piece out of Redmond, which is a response to the recent VMware Hybrid Cloud announcement — although it does have a sort of desperate, blown-gasket feel to it.
TL;DR takeaway: As of yesterday, innovators are forbidden to release new products or services for their customers. Sorry. Too late.
And that’s very convenient for Microsoft, especially when it comes to cloud computing and virtual infrastructure. I mean, if you look at some of the crazy things they were trying to do in order to be relevant in the past, such as peddle enormous cloud “appliances” that nobody wanted. But it’s fine, because they killed that off just prior to the cutoff date.
And oh, speaking of flailing cloud strategies… lucky for the Azure team that they kind of almost finally have their IaaS offering sorted out in 2013 with the VM Role. I mean Azure VMs. Or is that in beta — a.k.a. “Preview” — still? We’ve all lost track.
That article also does a lot of bragging about experience running public cloud services, for good reason — they have amassed broad expertise in dealing with issues such as SSL certificate expiration, air conditioner firmware upgrade failures, and leap year glitches. Huge competitive advantage, for sure.
For some, I would imagine that rebooting the cloud every Patch Tuesday really is “good enough” — others prefer a more reliable foundation than Microsoft Windows.
Don’t “Go Turbo” on us, Microsoft…
Love the reference to Wreck it Ralph.
It will be nice when MS lays down and accepts their role as second fiddle in the virtualization market. I am sick of having to learn about it just so I can explain to a customer why VMware is so much better. Then again, VMware could reduce it’s price so I don’t have to justify the cost! 🙂
Either way, the engineers in Palo Alto are doing well enough by me.
…you are delusional Brett. I bet you remember fondly the days where you said the same thing about Novell, Lantastic, Banyan Vines, Netscape or any of the other companies who had great products but lost their vision…focused on ‘features’ and couldn’t see the forest for the trees. I do the same thing as you apparently – work with customers – and I’m happy to have the conversation with them about a product that costs less, does the same and I book more services with the $$ they save not getting eviscerated by VMware’s licensing. Even worse, my customers don’t know what curve ball VMware will thrown with their next .1 release where they go back to the well to get paid again and who knows what’s going to happen with the license…
I bet you are one of those guys who thought you could make a living as an “Active Directory or NDS engineer”. Virtualization is a feature my friend.
*sigh* here we go again…
First of all, you might want to board up your glass house before you start throwing rocks. I still can’t believe VMware actually pays you to post this drivel.
Before you start making fun of anyone else’s ‘public cloud’…maybe you should have one of your own…or at least a strategy that works. Nice job VMware…let’s do this hosted partner thing so that all of our VAR’s can go tell their customers who want VMware IaaS to go write Verizon a check. Brilliant.
It’s sad that it’s turning to this. VMware is a great product and I personally have loved using it for many years. But you guys are just simply turning into a bunch of tools. Your new “Hybrid” strategy is barely off the press (and what a great strategy…more of the same but now we’re going to finally incent the VAR community with ‘points’ to sell the hybrid cloud) and you’re already poking fun at another vendor who actually has a product in this space…yeah, preview or whatever…it’s more than you have.
Anyone see James’s blog out on Forrester a few weeks ago? I quote (several times):
Forgive my frankness, Mr. Gelsinger, but you just don’t get it. Public clouds are not your enemy. And the disruption they are causing to your forward revenues are not their capture of enterprise workloads.
The average corporate vSphere environment — even if the enterprise I&O team has chosen to deploy vCloud Director — isn’t self-service. It doesn’t provide fast access to fully configured environments. It wouldn’t know what to do with a Chef script and it certainly couldn’t be had for $5 on a Visa card. For VMware and for enterprise vSphere administrators to capture the new enterprise applications, they need to rethink their approach and make the radical and culturally difficult shift from infrastructure management to service delivery. You need to learn from the clouds, not demonize them.
Read the rest for yourselves…is quite entertaining…
http://blogs.forrester.com/james_staten/13-02-28-the_vmware_community_has_the_innovators_dilemma
Nice post, I agree at least Microsoft have a product and working solution
VMware are suddenly finding themselves less relevant.
…agreed. My favorite is how Eric starts the article claiming all kinds of FUD in that MS article. I mean, I read it – where is the FUD? VMware is schizo…with it’s cloud strategy and licensing (lets drop the advanced SKU and make everyone pay to move up…no let’s not do that…let’s double the price with vTax…no, we won’t double the price but we’ll do the vTax…um, OK…no more vTax and we’ll bundle some cloud stuff into vSphere and raise the price…). The brass are all leaving or being shuffled around, market share is dropping, partner margins are dropping, competition is heavy…
It’s the trainwreck you don’t want to watch…but then you kinda do because you come and read this kind of garbage and wonder what the heck are these guys thinking. How pretentious (we were the first…so we will always be the best…) and narcisitic can these guys get – especially in this competetive climate.
whilst hiding behind a so called disclaimer that the comments are not that of VMware, yet you are the person charged with compete. imagine the fiasco if a Microsoft employee set up a website dedicated to bashing the competition under the guise of “its my personal opinion”
the pressure must really be on if the company can sink this low
…I’ve seen their compete session at VMworld…it’s equally as embarrasing.
The writing was always on the wall. Their core product has been essentially commoditized and turned into a feature…and not just from Microsoft. It was a matter of time before everyone caught up. Sure, they can create the outer space features that a fraction of a percent of customers will use and say they have the most checkboxes…but who cares. Remember back in the mid 90’s when everyone went crazy with TCP/IP…use the Windows NT IP stack, Lantastic, Banyan Vines…???? Now no one cares…it’s a NIC and an IP address…we belly laugh at how dumb those conversations were back then. This conversation is quickly moving in that direction…
@Kent you post an awful lot of replies here…
Not sure why you start to pick on VMware’s licensing. Licensing is complicated with Microsoft too and they change how it all works as well. It’s even quite normal for big companies as small changes end up to be big revenues.
With Microsoft you even get special licensing courses… Can’t be that easy then?
I think the licensing discussion is off topic anyways.
The real story here is the new cloud offering and VMware will have to proof how well they do. I’m confident about the technology they use as personally I am of the opinion that it is very mature. The question is how it will play out with the automation and management and … well many factors. Let’s wait and see.
I wish them good luck and do expect them to do well.
the difference being that when it comes to virtualisation and management (this topic), its actually very simple .. you license the physical server and everything is included … I think its pretty easy to understand. oh and the more virtualisation you do, the cheaper it gets.
you think VMware moved away from vTax based on customer feedback? seemed to change not long after Microsoft simplified it all .. coincidence?
…the complexity of the licensing wasns’t my point. My point was VMware has gone schizo – and licensing happens to be a pretty good example of that. They can’t seem to make up their mind what they want to be when they grow up and realize that customers don’t care anymore that they were ‘first’. And yes, when I see garbage like this – I’ll post.
I’m also not disupting maturity or anything specific about any product…Microsoft or VMware…but like I said in my original post – before you start slinging rocks you better board up your glass house. If Eric even got close to offering a realistic comparison or provided in any way an attempt to educate any of his readers on the FUD he refers to then I’d have no compalints. But he doesn’t…he rarely does. Instead he chooses to post links to cartoons.
And so goes VMware…
Kent
If the core product is commoditized then why do Microsoft feel that they need to give it away for free? It will never be truly commoditized until the software north of the hypervisor can use it drive the business outcomes that customers need. What are they achieving by giving it away for free? Is there some catch? No that couldn’t be it, that never happens in life.
Take it from a customer of both IMO VMware’s solution top to bottom is still far superior to Microsoft’s, the fact they still talk to me about replacing a hypervisor I have had working for years and built and entire IT business around just shows that they don’t get it. Sadly, they try and perpetuate this to their customers and the majority believe them,1 clearly!
…it’s not free. It’s a feature included in Windows Server. There is a free version but all you can do is Hyper-V and use the server core implementation…however, it’s way more robust than what you get with the ‘free’ ESX. I guess according your logic ESX should be commodotized as well since it’s free also?
Ignorance is bliss, I guess.
No you missed my point, if all hypervizors are created equal (feature, price etc) then it might be possible for them to be commoditized. In reality, the very vast majority of customers don’t care, they don’t care about what hypervizor they use as long as it enables the business outcomes that they are trying to achieve within a price they are willing to pay in terms of TCO. The proof is in the pudding that ESX is far more capable for enabling this for customers to achieve this given the amount of those who have done so and those who have done so on HyperV. Call it reliability, enterprise ready, mature whatever you like but this is the absolute reality of the industry at the moment regardless of where you come from.
I love the logic that since something has been around longer it’s better.
Hypervisors were a commodity several years ago. I haven’t had a conversation with a customer about a hypervisor feature in 2 years. It’s about what else a vendor has to offer – products, features, roadmap, cloud capabilties, management, etc… IMHO, MS has a leg up here – price/performance – they are kicking VMware’s tail and they feel it. Look at the last few posts on this site if you don’t think so. What a joke.
So, there are those that can keep their head in the sand and pretend that MS doesn’t have a clue and they’ll never catch up (by the way, they’ve caught up…surpassed in quite a few areas) and since VMware was first they’ll always be best. I guess the same could be said of Netscape, Novell, etc… right?
Keep doing that – you’re not doing yourself or your customers any favors playing the MS is behind card so you should keep going with VMware…”proof is in the pudding…VMware is better” card. I could point you to any of several dozen customers I work with that are running workloads on Hyper-V that they were previously running on ESX that are ecstatic…performance, usability, integration into other platforms, etc… and there’s the bonus that’s it’s a 1/5th the cost and they don’t have to worry about VMware’s licensing schizophrenia.
Frankly, if I wanted any of my customers to question their loyality to VMware – I should probably just start sending them here. This site used to be decent – now it’s a joke. If VMware was really that much better than MS at this point then lets see some real content here. But we won’t – just lame video’s with total FUD.
As I said, ignorance is bliss.
Not sure I follow, you mentioned its about other products, features, roadmap, cloud capabilties, management and then say the differentiator is about price again. It fundamentally depends on what price you are talking about the upfront cost, or the operational cost over time, you have to understand how a customer assesses cost to make that statement. The Netscape analogy misses the mark, vSphere is still a superior product as at June 2013 period, (granted HyperV 3 matched and even exceeded some features, but completely misses others many that they cant deliver on, yet) which is what you argued in the first place.I’m not saying that Microsoft don’t have a good story to tell their customers, no doubt they do, no doubt VMware has customers that also find a use for HyperV, what they run their core business on is still VMware for now. Where ever that moves to in the future is pure conjecture or marketing, so I’m done with this. In any event, it makes for a good industry to work in and keeps us all in a job.
…Frank I assure you I forgot more about this stuff than you know. You keep talking in circles – like most folks who have made a living selling virtualization as some magical thing. It’s not anymore – it’s a feature, a commodity. And yes, customers look to vendors who can provide the best price/performance solution. That’s the real world. I’d be glad to introduce you to many, many customers who would claim exactly the opposite – to say VMware is the superior product as of June 2013 is just plain ignorant. Best for what? Best for customers who don’t need half of the features but have to pay through the nose to get just one of them? Customers who want to dabble in the cloud and have to pay twice or 3 times for features for the same VM’s…or how about customers who want to do the things that ONLY Microsoft can do. I know in your infinite wisdom you think otherwise…but I assure you there is a list a mile long of capabilities customers require that VMware can’t deliver on – period.
I tell my customers all the time that want to do the matrix/checkbox comparison, “VMware does stuff Microsoft doesn’t do and Microsoft (and other vendors) do stuff that VMware doesn’t do…so, let’s figure out what it is that YOU want to do and map the best solution to your needs that fits your price point”. If you aren’t doing that then you’re doing your customers an injustice and out of a job when your customers start demanding other solutions that you can’t deliver on because you’ve been too busy drinking the VMware cool-aid.
But again, ignorance is bliss…