Saturday, January 30, 2016

VMware Fusion

Christian Hammond (via Craig Hockenberry and Paul Haddad, comments):

Yesterday morning, the Hosted UI team, responsible for VMware’s Workstation and Fusion products, woke up to find themselves out of a job. These products, despite being award-winning and profitable, are probably not long for this world.

Rob Griffiths:

Sad about Fusion, it was always my fave. Much more “Mac like” than Parallels with great performance. Will keep using it until I can’t.

It hasn’t been canceled, but the entire local team is gone. I read something that said future dev is offshored to China.

Sean Gallagher:

When contacted to comment, a VMware spokesman said that the company was committed to continuing development and support for Fusion and Workstation and that the company was “transitioning the Fusion and Workstation teams to co-locate” with the rest of the company as part of its reorganization. “Our commitment to Fusion and Workstation products is unchanged,” he said.

[…]

VMware was acquired by EMC in 2004, which offered 15 percent of VMware’s stock in a 2007 initial public offering. EMC is in the process of being acquired by Dell, which would give Dell a majority stake in VMware (though the company will remain independent).

Fusion is a great app. I hope it lives on.

Previously: Turning Off Ads in Parallels, Parallels Desktop 9 and Parallels Access.

Update (2016-02-08): Christian Hammond (via Hacker News):

I’d like to share some thoughts and pictures from a few people in our team about what made our team great, and share some comments from some of our users. Keeping it positive here.

Update (2018-09-27): Michael Roy:

Fwiw, we’ve restructured since then. The lay-off was a call by 1 person who is no longer with VMware, and should have never happened. I went on a 2 year mission to fix, and we’ve just moved into the vSphere team and are doubling our headcount.

I’m very excited for the future :)

4 Comments RSS · Twitter

William T. Johnson

How easy would it be for the PLA (which seems to control tech-everything in China) to inject a back-door into Fusion's networking code?

Does VirtualBox have anything comparable to the three views in Fusion -- i.e. Single Window, Full Screen, and (especially) Unity?

"I read something that said future dev is offshored to China."

off-shored to China (or to a contractor) = dead product (cf Twitter for Mac).

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