I don't think Hock cares. From the outset, I've read his goal as simply to continue to pile on temporary stability via software acquisitions to ride out the semi-chaotic chip market's ups and downs. He wanted something that would give his share price a shelf to prevent it from the wild swings it used to have. He obviously didn't bank on the AI-chip boom, which has rendered this at least currently unnecessary, but either way it's seemed to me after seeing Symantec and CA's absorption first that he just needs 5-7 years of pure exploitative profit out of his software acquisitions before he lines up the next big buy that will draw attention and locked-in customers for the next 5-10 years. His plan all along was to focus on the big, entrenched customers at VMware, and abandon any semblance of new or innovative development that worked for customers outside of that grouping. He doesn't care about the long term potential, he doesn't care about all of the feeder pipelines like the college programs or VMUGs, because he doesn't need VMware to keep growing, he just needs the cash for now. A better question would be, who is next?

I worked for an MDM company for almost a decade; this is patently false. If your company is doing this, they've gone around the functionality that Apple and Google built into their phones to support BOYD and the separation of work and personal profiles. I know this for a fact, because again, I helped to build and implement this over 5+ years ago.

Then they're using bad MDM solutions, because that's entirely possible for the last 6+ years with both iOS and Android.

I got laid off in 2021, and had a number of recruiters at Amazon reach out for different positions. Some of them paid well, or gave me a title bump relative to where I was at, but I resisted the obvious choices because all I ever hear from people at Amazon is that it's a meat grinder that sucks you up and spits you out. Less than 2 years later they've now at least announced the layoff of more than 20,000 people. I think I made the right call.

A ton of the big software companies spent so much on costly real estate and facilities before COVID, they need butts in seats in the office to justify the sunk money. When I was managing teams before and during the pandemic, my teams were far, far more productive from home than they were in office. But that lease was just sitting there staring at somebody in upper management like an anchor on their balance sheet that they feel compelled to answer for.

I'm with you 100%. I don't understand why everybody hated SGU so much, as I found the show completely engrossing and interesting. It took longer to bond with the characters, but that's because McGuyver wasn't wisecracking on the firing line in this one. I, for one, already miss the show, and we're still supposed to get the 2nd half of season 2. All those people that enjoyed SG-1 Redux, aka Atlantis, just wanted another copy of the original. I was thrilled they did something totally different with the property.

Nobody knows you've done anything at all.

Behold the mighty reach of Capitalism! The waves crash and the seas may boil, but the market reaches into the hearts of even the most desperate!

This falls into the same category that anything Linus says does for me. Just because you've had one good idea, doesn't mean we should listen to you about anything else. Bram doesn't sound like he knows what he's talking about, and he's using the position he gained by inventing something lots of people use to push his opinion. Linus tries that all the time, and I usually don't give him the time of day either.