You run a well-known online backup company and I don't, but my reaction was exactly the same: The only VMware products I've ever cared about are Workstation and Fusion, neither of which is on the list.
On the one hand, it's pretty cool that VMware has pivoted so successfully over the past 15 years from being solely focused on a hypervisor (or, I suppose in modern terminology, "self-hosted cloud") business that the cloud largely supplanted. On the other hand, it's sad for someone like me, who used Workstation to run VMs at home (I moved to VirtualBox), and have thought at times about spinning up ESXi.
In early 2006 I asked the original author and the current maintainer for their blessing to use the domain "rsync.net" for (re)incorporating the offsite backup component of the ISP I started in 2001[1].
I gave them right of first refusal, etc., and they said my use of "rsync.net" as the name of the company, domain name, etc., was acceptable.
their main business for two decades has been datacenter virtualization. Individual developers don't care about it, sure, but it's a huge software business.
Workstation and fusion were never big money makers. They were more of a labor of love.
I joined VMware just after the release of Businessware 2.0 - which I agree was 14 years ago.
The big money maker was vmotion because it allowed datacenters to decouple the server from the underlying hardware. Ever after, the money was in the datacenter products.
good point… I don’t think they’re billion dollar businesses though. Probably hundreds of millions? Hard to say as I don’t think VMware publishes this info
It reminds me of the first episode of Saturday Night Live after the original 1975 cast all left. In the first episode, the new cast did a sketch in which they each described themselves as a version/variant of/similar to a member of the old cast.
(Everyone was fired after that season, except for Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo.)
