Coté Memo: 3:30am plastic man traveling, keeping up the VMware's CAGR

Aug 26, 2014

Meta-data

Hello again, welcome to #26. Today we have 33 subscribers, so we're +1. DANDY! I'd love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io.

See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote.

Follow-up

Yup, no email on Friday. Sorry about that. There was a lot going on, plus family visiting.

Tech & Work World

Traveling, or, "Your privilege is showing"

I woke up at 3:30am central to catch a 5:59am flight from Austin, to Dallas, and then another to San Francisco. It's actually a good route: you get the San Francisco at about 9:30am pacific time, a full day without a red-eye. At the airport, while Uber told me there was an extended 15% off on UberX, there were non-available, so I took the BART (or is it Muni - I never know) which dumped me at Powell.

I found that the suit jacket I'd brought was, well, too worn to use, so right across the street I went to the friendly Burlington Coat Factory, and picked up a new sports coat and a belt - which I'd forgotten as well. For some reason, I go to that store a lot when I'm here. I find the discount clothes racks and normalness of it relaxing.

Conference season is starting up for me, here for VMworld. Tech conferences always leave me feeling delighted (I'm a special traveling person - hearing NDA slides - people want to talk with me), and oddly plastic at the same time.

VMworld, day 01

VMware is in an odd position. It's struggling to cater to it's cash-cow customer base and fighting itself - and it's customer-base - to evolve the market...slowly, carefully. They're the Microsoft of our times; that is: for those of us who became tech-aware in the late 90s. By that time, Microsoft was already waning, though no one knew it. We were all reading man pages and figuring out CGI-BIN. Netscape and jwz.

At the time, Microsoft was just fine, thank you. And they're actually kind of sort of just fine, thank you,now. They seem like they could pull it off - lasting, and I think VMware is in that crux Microsoft was in the early 2000s.

In tech, there's this moment where your customer is no longer the smartest person in the room, and that's a dangerous time. It's when you have to think on their behalf, shepherd them along to a new way of thinking. VMware is trying to do that, but by their own anecdotes, the customers are kicking and screaming on the way the change. VMware has positioned itself as supporting numerous different platforms: vSphere/ESX, OpenStack, Docker, and more. That's a good portfolio hedge to have when no one - including the customer - has any idea what they want. It's a safe bet, and one I'd make as a large company.

During the analyst day, VMware went over corporate strategy and discussed the TAM it'd created for itself. There was a confusing NDA psuedo-blanket on today's analyst session (always bad practice for an analyst day, but, hey, smoke 'em if you got 'em). Anyhow, I decided to play revenue projects following the old, history will repeat itself. So, once I did a rough calulation of CAGR, I projected that to 2017, assuming it's remain constant at ~20%:

Wouldn't be too bad, eh?

(I liked Lydia Leong's write-up of where VMware is, including the all important last, parenthetical point.)

Do you like virtual desktops, and getting caught in the rain?

I have a report on Teradici up if you're into PCoIP and/or workstations.

Fun & IRL

No fun today, just work.