Layoffs at VMWare to Impact Workstation and Fusion Virtualization Products

Layoffs at VMWare to Impact Workstation and Fusion Virtualization Products

A panicked blog post from an ex-VMWare employee claims that the teams at the company responsible for VMWare Workstation and Fusion have been laid off. Worse, those products could now simply disappear.

Note: VMWare’s earnings announcement does say that 800 people have been laid off and that the firm will now focus on “growth products”. The part of the company that made Workstation and Fusion was about 20 people. –Paul

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“Workstation, Fusion, and our other products may survive in maintenance mode, or they may disappear,” the unnamed former employee claims. “It’s hard to say at this point what will happen. What I can say is that no matter what happens to them, they had an amazing run, and are something every one of us can be proud of the rest of our careers.”

Given the fact that this author left VMWare previously, he may literally have no idea what the company intends to do with Workstation or Fusion, which provide virtualization functionality for individuals on Windows and Mac, respectively. But it’s fair to say that both products have been squeezed out by more sophisticated and free bundled solutions like Hyper-V (Windows), or by free solutions like Oracle VirtualBox.

The author says as much.

“Workstation made a lot of money, but not the hundreds of millions the company would have preferred,” he writes. “This, I believe, ultimately led to yesterday’s sad outcome.”

Interesting. If you are a Mac user looking at running Windows on that machine, I recommend Parallels Desktop, which I found to be superior to VMWare Fusion (and to Boot Camp, for that matter). That said, another several months and another OS X version has come and gone, so I’ll be looking at that again in 2016.

 

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