Dell is Considering a Sale To VMware in What May Be Tech's Biggest Deal Ever (cnbc.com)

CNBC reports: Dell Technologies could emerge as a public company through a reverse-merger with VMware, the $60 billion cloud computing company it already controls, according to people familiar with the matter. The reverse merger, whereby VMware would actually buy the larger Dell, would then allow Dell to be traded publicly without going through a formal listing. It would also likely be the biggest deal in tech industry history, giving investors who backed Dell's move to go private in 2013 a way to monetize their deal, while helping Dell pay down some of its approximately $50 billion debt.

Comments

What's Icahn say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because if anyone can screw you, it's that guy!

Re:What's Icahn say?

[dgatwood]

*shrugs*

This strategy worked well for Apple/NeXT, where NeXT bought Apple for negative $429 million. I'd imagine Icahn would approve. :-)

Re:What's Icahn say?

[TheFakeTimCook]

*shrugs*

This strategy worked well for Apple/NeXT, where NeXT bought Apple for negative $429 million. I'd imagine Icahn would approve. :-)

That meme has long passed its usefulness.

There was some technology-transfer, and some engineering and managerial talent came over, just like in any "tech" acquisition; but, other some significant parts of the OS (which is obviously what Apple REALLY wanted), Apple in no way became "NeXT".

1. No H. Ross Perot.

2. No change in marketing focus. NeXT was virtually unknown outside of large Universities. Apple was always much more "General Purpose".

3. No Display Postscript.

4. No Monochrome-Only monitors.

5. Longstanding backwards-compatibility with MacOS "Classic" through the CarbonLib API.

The list goes on.

Re:What's Icahn say?

[dgatwood]

*shrugs*

That's the way people who worked at Apple through the transition often jokingly described it. The current macOS is, despite your protestations, almost entirely derived from NeXT + new code. It shares almost no code with Mac OS 9 and earlier. Basically, NeXT acquired Apple's name and marketing department, and then slowly integrated Apple's engineers over the course of half a decade.

Regarding your five points specifically:

1. (Perot) Out of NeXT's board, Apple kept the ones with actual computer industry experience (SJ and Avie). Perot was just a financier, which Apple had no need for at the time.

2. (Marketing) Why would they change marketing focus? Apple was actually making money. The value of the reverse acquisition was in the Apple name and marketing, rather than in the tech.

3. (Display Postscript) Nor does it use any of the windowing and display management code from Mac OS 9. OS X's WindowServer tech was a ground-up rewrite, AFAIK.

4. Apple stopped being monochrome-only with the Macintosh II, way back in 1987, almost a decade before the NeXT reverse acquisition. The last monochrome Mac was the Classic II, which was discontinued in 1993, about three years before the NeXT reverse acquisition.

5. Carbon is only still around because of Adobe and a few other holdouts. Otherwise, it would have been gone by 10.2 or so. It was always intended to be temporary. As it stands, all but a few low-level bits of Carbon are unavailable in 64-bit apps, and will go away when 32-bit support goes away. Either way, using Carbon as proof that NeXT engineering didn't completely take over Apple's engineering is approximately equivalent to saying that two cars are the same because they use the same cupholders. :-)

Obstruction of Justice, Treason

[Anonymous Coward]

FBI Deputy Director pushed out by infamous traitor Donald Trump, to aid the coverup of his conspiracy with Russia's hacking and information warfare operations against the United States of America.

Re:Obstruction of Justice, Treason

[haruchai]

LOL... Just gave him some extra paid vacation time.... He was already going to leave, having announced his retirement weeks ago.

For that you will try and invent a charge of Treason? Obstruction? Collusion? What now? You all need to lighten up a bit on this, because you are riding a crazy train worse than Trump's.

He's not even 50 yrs old and is retiring already? Comey is 57; Mueller is 73

So Dells service will get even worse?

[greenwow]

Never thought that could happen, but here we are.

Re:So Dells service will get even worse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell will now require you to install flash player to manage its hardware.

Re: So Dells service will get even worse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Vmware has all but moved away from flash. Not vmwares fault people won't upgrade esxi past 5.x

Why get rid of a money maker?

[SUCK MY BALLS!!!]

It's like how Sharp sold off all of its business divisions...
...or how IBM sold all of its divisions.

If it's bringing in money, why not let it happily chug along?

Re:Why get rid of a money maker?

[Anonymous Coward]

because they've over extended their financing, and would like to cash in sooner rather then 10-20 years from now

Re:Why get rid of a money maker?

[jellomizer]

Because it allows the company to put more money in resources that make more money.
Lets say you have a Lemonade stand.
That sold Lemonade, and Cookies.
Every glass of Lemonade makes a profit of $0.50
Every cookie makes a profit of $0.25

You find that Customers will buy a glass of Lemonade or a Cookie but rarely both.
So lets say on average you make $75.00 a day on that one stand.

Now your line at your stand is very long, so there are people leaving the line or just not waiting.
You need to have an other stand, but you do not have the money to make a new stand and man it.
So you sell your cookie recipe and rights to it for the cost of making a new stand plus some extra for an other employee.

So now you can sell twice as much Lemonade as before, even at the expense of not having cookie sales. You end up with more money.
Because you will now make $100.00 a day for each stand, with 2 stands you make $200.00 a day.

So by selling off a profitable item and reinvesting its money, you now have 2.5 times the profit.

Re:Why get rid of a money maker?

[TheFakeTimCook]

So by selling off a profitable item and reinvesting its money, you now have 2.5 times the profit.

Or you can just make a decent product that people actually like without having to race to the bottom with your dozens of exactly-alike competitors, and end up with $200 BEELION in the bank, and NO long-term debt!

In other words, you can be smart, like Apple; or just another "me too!" shitbox maker like Dell, circling the drain for the past 15 years or so...

Re: Why get rid of a money maker?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it's because Dell understands the value of going public again. They only went private so they could buy emc. That discussion was in the pipeline even before Dell officially went private. No way the shareholders would have voted to take on that much debt as a publicly traded company. Now that it's done however, it's time to show off what that merger accomplished. I personally think a merger with Microsoft would be a smarter move however.

Re:Why get rid of a money maker?

[silvergate]

I will just add that my daughter had a lemonade stand and she made more money then im making today. now she owns a lemonade factory. silver

Re:Why get rid of a money maker?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to have an other stand, but you do not have the money to make a new stand and man it.

This sounds more like you're either under-priced or very bad at managing finances.

Corporate Raiders

[Anonymous Coward]

Right out of the Corporate Raiders playbook. Buy a company, bleed
it dry, make it borrow (hence the 50 billion debt), and dump it, in this
case to the public.

Re:Corporate Raiders

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better:

Buy a company, take it private, bleed it dry, go public again, repeat as often as desired.

Re:Corporate Raiders

[Anonymous Coward]

1.) MAKE a company (Dell);
2.) SELL IT (to the public) -- IPO
3.) Tank Share price / make it look in decline, yet prime it for future growth (Buy EMC / other acquisitions -- these make GAAP financials look devastating for a couple years).
4.) BUY it back (take it private). ignore fiduciary to shareholders and short-change--- Sell company back diry-cheap (as Michale Dell DID, as courts ruled -- but did nothing for punishment).
5.) SELL It to the public -- IPO (and when its big enough market cap, ETF's automatically HAVE to purchase shares.

Plot twist, their going to use VMWare to accelerate a step to #3, to repeat this process.

Re:Corporate Raiders

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I dislike them this really is more a case of a company circling the drain for the last decade with gaping wounds causing it to bleed out. When it was purchased 5 years or so ago it was already in serious financial trouble. In 2013 their was an offer to buy the company which was then later withdrawn after they realised how bad a position Dell was in.

Re: Corporate Raiders

[Anonymous Coward]

The corporate equivalent of organized crimeâ(TM)s âoebust out âoe scam. See: Sopranos or Goodfellas

Re:Corporate Raiders

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a public (government/taxpayer owned) utility, mismanage and load it up with debt, then sell it to a private, cronie-controlled interest while keeping the debt with the taxpayer because "they wouldn't buy it any other way". Crystal ball says: Manitoba Hydro.

I only have one question

[Baron_Yam]

Is this more or less a game on paper to get an infusion of cash for Dell, or could this actually have an effect on the VMWare business where I should be prepared for a chance of VMWare dying off?

Re:I only have one question

[110010001000]

You should always be prepared if your business depends on a closed source software company. They could drop a product and you would have no recourse. If you don't have the sourcecode you don't have anything.

Re:I only have one question

[geek]

I hope VMWare doesnt die off. They still have the best product for locally hosted VM's. Their pricing is what sucks and thats easily fixable.

I also like Dell a lot lately. I just bought a Ryzen 7 1800X desktop from them an a decent 13 inch inspirion laptop. The prices are reasonable and the quality has been acceptable. If this merger/buyout thing improves them both then I'm all for it.

Re:I only have one question

[Rob Riggs]

Is this more or less a game on paper to get an infusion of cash for Dell, or could this actually have an effect on the VMWare business where I should be prepared for a chance of VMWare dying off?

If you are a shareholder in VMware, you're about to be screwed. If you think Dell will hang like an albatross around VMware's neck and you are a VMware customer, you're screwed. If you are an investor in Dell, your are about to spread the cost of your fuck-up on the public market, and specifically on VMware's other shareholders. (See stories hitting the wire that look like "VMware plunges on news...)

Re:I only have one question

[Anonymous Coward]

SOON TO be listed as "vapor ware" for a change name

Re:I only have one question

[Anonymous Coward]

None of the above. And it's a sign of a market approaching its top when we start seeing deals like this.

Re:I only have one question

[swb]

Who can tell?

Dell has mostly re-branded themselves as DellEMC, which I think was supposed to be an upgrade for the Dell name to associate it with the EMC brand. That being said, I always thought buying EMC was just a gimmick to get VMware but in my exposure it sure seems like EMC won internally, and the Dell people were shoved aside.

Overall, I don't understand their conflicting strategy. If you talk to a "Dell EMC" rep for more than 5 minutes, they will try to sell you their 3x overpriced EMC vxRail platform which is VMware vSAN on top of proprietary mini-blade chasis of like 4 nodes.

The strange part of the whole hyperconverged storage/virtualization model coming out of DellEMC is that EMC is a major SAN vendor selling against its own brand/products, made worse by ALSO selling Nutanix which directly competes against VMware vSAN *and* the SAN business.

I think the company is so big and has so much overlap they need to reconsider what they're doing and greatly trim product lines. I can't help but think VMware innovation is totally choked by being owned by a giant hardware company -- any innovative ideas that don't involve selling more and more expensive hardware will die on the vine. The hardware side can't adapt to emerging software defined storage unless its meant to boost VMware first. And of course everybody has to bow to EMC's giant portfolio lest someone mess with their accounts.

I would have thought the smarter play for Dell would have been to have kept VMware as a wholly owned subsidiary but let it self-manage (even if self-managing didn't mean coding for Dell's proprietary platform) and then sell off EMC. EMC seems like the dinosaur whose market can't really ever grow that much because the products are too expensive for anything but Fortune 500.

Re:I only have one question

[Major_Disorder]

Is this more or less a game on paper to get an infusion of cash for Dell, or could this actually have an effect on the VMWare business where I should be prepared for a chance of VMWare dying off?

If VMWare dies, check out https://www.proxmox.com/ . Not a drop in replacement I admit, but a very impressive open-source VM server. Something to keep in mind for emergencies.

Re:I only have one question

[sit1963nz]

NO VM would get bought by someone else.

What they are doing is making private debt (Dell) into public debt (VM Shareholders) so that the wealthy people who are owed a lot of money by get get it back and the risk/failure is pushed onto small share holders who lack to voting power to stop it.

At this point, one of the wealthy people who pulled out early will get to buy the only asset worth anything (VMWare) cheaply and make even more money.

This is why the share market is like a casino. The Wealth (call them the house) always wins, and the huge pool of shareholders who can not get enough votes to stop the wealthy are the victims (gamblers). Its just another way of transferring wealth from the poor to the rich.

Re:I only have one question

[Aighearach]

Like Bill Gates understood decades ago, if you're willing to need them, then yes they will screw you over.

If you were already ready to switch to a different supplier if needed, then you don't need them and you won't get screwed by them unless you're an idiot.

Re:I only have one question

[Guitargeek86]

Proxmox might be cool and all, but if you want something open that is on the same playing field as VmWare get Ovirt. If you get stuck you can always get paid red-hat support so you won't lose your job if it has issues. I have been very happy with a lab I built for DR using Ovirt amongst 3 servers all on a 10gigE setup and Gluster. The hardest part is the chicken and egg issue of setting up the cluster, but if you do it right you will be able to harness an awesome setup for hyper-converged that is fast and was only 5% behind when I tested it against our real VMware setup. An alternate setup also would be to install Nas4free which can run virtualbox and or KVM on it, install the Ovirt management engine, and then build a sister box. Sync up the stores and then also build a third box for offsite and just use the sync setup of ZFS. You will still get the great performance off of the storage infrastructure and then you can have specific servers for CPU only with minimal storage capacity. Hyper-Converged is where it's at in my opinion though. I like Ovirt because it works with KVM which I feel is the best feature based hypervisor right now. I have not honestly needed to do anything with Docker and containers but it supports it if I do, as well as exporting into AWS if needed. The biggest advantage though is that you can convert hosts from other hypervisors such as ESX to Ovirt.

Re:I only have one question

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Dell has rebranded themselves as Dell Technologies as they sell off EMC bit by bit.

Dell buying EMC was to get Isilon after EMC outbid them for it in 2010. Little remains of EMC at this point.

I feel that Dell was out to plunder the IP anyway. It's now a patent powerhouse.

Disclaimer: I work for Dell EMC. Hence anon.

Re: I only have one question

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize Dell is VMware's largest shareholder and they already control 80% of the company, right?

Re:I only have one question

[Anonymous Coward]

what kind of stupid bitch uses GPL violating vmware?

Re:I only have one question

[swb]

What's weird is that Compellent, which was a big deal, now feels like a bastard stepchild, almost worse than Equallogic was relative to Compellent before the merger.

The product overlap is crazy and pre-merger Dell partners are now stumbling around trying to sell high margin EMC products but most weren't dealing with EMC-scale customers before hand and aren't being successful at it.

The extreme focus on HCI and VxRail is also kind silly, IMHO. It's way more expensive than standard host + san solutions and I think the push to sell it winds up selling cheaper competing products like Nutanix (but not Dell Nutanix) and Simplivity or even other non-HCI classic SAN solutions, usually all-flash.

And then there's vSAN itself, which is mostly platform agnostic, so why not just spec and order regular rack servers and skip the VxRail expense?

Re: I only have one question

[Rob Riggs]

That's why it says "VMware's other shareholders". But I guess you posted AC because you know your reading comprehension sucks ass. They still get to make the other 20% eat there shit, which is something.

This isn't surprising

[rsilvergun]

Following the big tax cut most CEOs when asked said they'd spend the money on mergers and acquisitions. Expect to see more of these..

Re:This isn't surprising

[110010001000]

Yes. Good time to invest in the mid/large cap US market. It is going through the roof! Big business won.

Re:This isn't surprising

[bobbied]

Yes. Good time to invest in the mid/large cap US market. It is going through the roof! Big business won.

And I'm winning as a stockholder and employee of same.... Wages/bonus increases, income tax reduction and my stock portfolio is doing very well. So big business won, and I won too as a result.

Re:This isn't surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends which CEOs were asked in that sample group. The largest of corporations have nowhere else left to grow to, but plenty of the small and medium sized companies do.

Re:This isn't surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

And what about everyone else? Or don't you care?

Re:This isn't surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

If you feed the horse plenty of oats, eventually they'll be some left behind for the sparrows

Re:This isn't surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

And what about everyone else? Or don't you care?

I certainly don't. Everyone else isn't going to pay my rent or car payment.

Re:This isn't surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Drives an economy car, supports repealing the estate tax

Re:This isn't surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

You won jack shit. You're a moronic cocksucker bobby.

Re:This isn't surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem envious...

Re:This isn't surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats on being able to buy 1 more hot dog per month.

Re:This isn't surprising

[phantomfive]

What is in the tax plan that encourages people to do that? I haven't heard.

Re:This isn't surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

The vast majority of employees in the United States don't own any stock; their retirement is Social Security.

Dell be another IBM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever considered Dell may eventually dump its PC business in favor of becoming more cloud services centric? IBM saw PC's as a losing battle, too much competition and this could be what long term Dell may be planning. If I was doing PC's I would skip the consumer/business line separation. Focus on one line or none. Business PC's would work better towards the cloud business then consumer PC's that don't really use cloud that much.

Re: Dell be another IBM?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would fine by me. Dell at one time 20 years ago used to care about consumer PCs and their customers. Ever try to buy one now off their website? You get a Dell customer ID, purchase ID, order ID. As if you were a corporate customer. But the first two mean nothing and will not help you until the order ID is issued. God forbid you have to call them. They have no understanding of English so they cannot help. Orders that say will ship in a week usually ship in a month. Assuming it ships at all. I finally gave up being a dell consumer. They just do not care.

Re: Dell be another IBM?

[Anonymous Coward]

This. Their website is a clusterfuck.

I want VMWare to add native CEPH storage to esxi

[Joe_Dragon]

I want VMWare to add native CEPH storage to esxi with changed blocks for easy diff backup.

Not for your bonuses

[rsilvergun]

odds are those were planned well in advance (I suppose it's possible you're a C level employee, in which case bully for you). I haven't heard a peep about wage increases except from Walmart, and aside from Fox News all the analysts agree those wage increases were because the economy's recovered enough they have to pay more to keep workers, nothing to do with the tax cuts.

Meanwhile the mergers and acquisitions are putting everybody's jobs at risk. After all, what's the first thing a company does after a M&A?

Re:Not for your bonuses

[bobbied]

LOL... In the current labor market we are approaching nearly full employment. Historically, you simply don't get much under 4% nation wide because about that many are unable/unwilling to actually work at any wage. A bit of churn isn't going to be a huge issue, nor is it going to blow up the unemployment numbers. Mergers in this situation don't create unemployment, but grows productivity and drives GDP increases, which is an all around good thing.

Currently we are starting to see labor shortages in some job markets, where qualified applicants are getting difficult to find. This is driving wages up and sucking people who'd not normally work, back into the market. The labor participation rate is going up, unemployment is approaching historical lows. The last time we had this rate was 17 years ago. IF it drops much more, it will be the lowest unemployment rate seen in my 50+ year life. A few layoffs won't be a huge issue, unless it happens to be you getting laid off, but you will likely find a new job quickly.

Re:Not for your bonuses

[thaylin]

Actually it has nothing to do with willingness/ability, but with people transitioning jobs. If you are unwilling/unable to work you are not on the unemployment rolls.

Re:Not for your bonuses

[Anonymous Coward]

It's "can't", you idiot!

Re:Not for your bonuses

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, sure there at lots of jobs. My girlfriend is working three of them! ... mostly because full-time positions are very hard to find in her field.

Suddenly "full employment" doesn't look so great.

these investors..

[Anonymous Coward]

should not be rewarded for their bone-headed decision to take dell private. that was a stupid, costly transaction led by a moron. let dell wilt and die under the weight of its debt

Re: these investors..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a fan of Dell. Your post was meaningless dribel, however. This is just plain Business.

  Now go get your shinebox.

Just make sure you get out

[rsilvergun]

before the inevitable crash. Hope you got somebody on the inside who lets you know when. Like these guys do.

Cheat

[ISoldat53]

There's a lot more money in a public company to cheat into your pockets, again.

I only have one hypervisor.

[Anonymous Coward]

VM images to a certain degree are cross-product. In other words viable images, are preserved.* So it doesn't matter if the hypervisor is closed or open.

*A property that's handy for dev locally, cloud deployed.

Mitt Romney

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better:

Buy a company, take it private, bleed it dry, go public again, repeat as often as desired.

That's how Mitt Romney got rich while at Bain Capital.

how does anyone make money?

[goombah99]

I don't get it. If you have an IPO then you can sell shares. SOmething is missing here. I think the missing thing has to be that VMware will have to issue new shares. For something this big, It's existing shareholders will need to approve that or else the Board has to vested with the ability to sell a massive amount of new shares.

This insanity should be illegal

[macraig]

Why is this even vaguely legal? If corporations are legally allowed to be persons, then why is it legal for one corporate person to buy and enslave another corporate person, and then turn around and sell that other person for profit?

We must hold corporate persons to the same standards of behavior and ethics as other persons. President Trump excepted, of course.

Re:This insanity should be illegal

[nealric]

It's amazing. I can have a baby in the Cayman Islands tomorrow, and nobody even has to have sex!

Re:This insanity should be illegal

[geek]

Jesus, people still harp on this "Corporations are people" bullshit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Read that and try to rationally argue against it. The very first paragraph should shut your whining up but god forbid people actually educate themselves and understand what "personhood" actually means in legal terms.

FFS its a tired ass argument with zero merit and a shit ton of FUD behind it.

Re:This insanity should be illegal

[Earthquake Retrofit]

I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executed one.

Re:This insanity should be illegal

[CanadianMacFan]

That'll only happen when a corporation can have an IQ of less than 60.

Re:This insanity should be illegal

[geek]

What's yours? 59?

Re: This insanity should be illegal

[Brockmire]

You mean like marriage and divorce?

When companies merge

[rsilvergun]

they fire redundant staff. Sometimes even if the staff isn't redundant they lay people off to recover the costs associated with the merger and make the survivors work harder. If you've never experienced this first hand you are either very young or very lucky.

Unemployment might not be as low as the stats make it look. If it really was 4% we should be seeing much, much stronger upward momentum on wages. So far it's barely keeping pace with inflation. Walmart's seems higher because they've been putting off pay raises for 7 or 8 years.

Re:When companies merge

[bobbied]

Ah, you assume way too much.. I hired on at a telecom that had just been merged from two companies in 2000 and kept that job for 12 years while the company went from 1200 employees to less than 500. I finally got the ax just before one of our customers purchased us to save money. The company apparently knew what was going to happen so they took pre-sale steps to adjust their books. So I've been there, done that. I've been left behind and the victim of a layoff. (The layoff was the best financial thing that ever happened to me, but that was because of the severance package.)

The reason we've not seen an uptick in wages is because we've had abysmal GDP growth numbers from 2008 though most of 2016, there was little hiring over attrition plus new people entering the labor pool. There was a huge pool of under employed and folks who where not in the labor market (where neither counted as unemployed or in the labor participation numbers). This pool is rapidly depleting. Since about November or 2016 the momentum has been growing and GDP growth has been ticking up close to 3%. This rate seems to be ticking up and anything over 2.5% is good for labor.

Raises will come. This year is my guess. But I will warn you that inflation will ALSO come along with higher interest rates. We've effectively been printing trillions of dollars and this will have an inflationary effect as or GDP grows, labor becomes scarce and productivity increases will be what drives GDP growth.

Re:When companies merge

[Solandri]

When companies merge they fire redundant staff.

You say that like it's a bad thing. When you fire redundant staff, you improve the efficiency of the remaining staff, which will eventually result in higher pay for them. The staff who were fired are freed up to find other jobs where they can be productive elsewhere. The overall result is a net increase in aggregate productivity.

It's like if a bridge was designed with 15 supports but only needs 12. If you can figure out a way to remove the 3 extra supports, you can re-use that material to help build something else. Net result being more stuff for the same cost (higher GDP per capita).

The problem with companies merging is loss of competition in the marketplace. If there are sufficient competitors, this isn't a problem. But if there are only a few major players, you need to be careful and keep the antitrust bat handy.

What? Dell is already a public company?

[Anonymous Coward]

This doesn't make any fucking sense.

Dell Technologies is already a public company. I already own shares.

Anyways Dell and VMWare are down almost 10% and 15% today. Maybe I should buy some more.

Sell it off, Return the Money to Shareholders

[TheFakeTimCook]

Eat those words well, Michael Dell.

Apple has ZERO long-term debt, and $200 BEELION in the bank.

NOW who's laughing?!?

Re:Sell it off, Return the Money to Shareholders

[Anonymous Coward]

Not anybody looking for decent hardware.

Apple is a non player; Sun is dead; you can't say HP with a straight face.

Dell's in the guillotine. Supermicro for everyone, I guess.

Re:Sell it off, Return the Money to Shareholders

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Apple has an awful lot of debt. They just happen to have even more than their debt in their bank account.

http://www.asymco.com/2018/01/18/the-apple-cash-faq/

Show a little class

[Earthquake Retrofit]

There's no need to resort to vulgar name calling when a couple of quotation marks will do fine. For instance, my old pal the Baroness tells me that this new president guy was known as Donald "John" Trump in the Dominatrix community. John in both senses of the word.

As a former EMC and VMware customer ...

[Anonymous Coward]

As a former EMC and VMware customer ...

Well, **former** is the most important part. Never plan to recommend or purchase anything from either of those companies again.

YMMV, of course.

EMC always charged the highest possible amount for anything. I doubt they've had any new accounts in years. We used lots of EMC storage. I was forced to spend about $5M for 2TB years ago. We did use BCVs because that was really the only answer that worked then. Performing upgrades was usually a fork lift because the firmware upgrades couldn't be applied when there were 50 project teams connecting to the same storage frame. Basically, each team would migrate to a newer frame to get newer firmware and with the last 10 refused, IT would mandate they move AND IT would have to pay for whatever it cost to move. By the time all that happened, it was time to move everyone from that frame to a newer one, to get needed firmware updates.

VMware seemed to learn their pricing strategy from the EMC execs. Dropped them in 2010 after their attempted 2-3x price increases. Even if we ran Windows, I wouldn't deploy on VMware. They seem to live in a world where customers don't know about any options. When VMWare tried to raise the prices from $2K/server to about $12K/server, we made plans to remove all VMware stuff from the environment and started migrating. I heard that VMware management decided back off those plans about 6 weeks later, but we'd already felt the sting of their whims. See ya'.

I have found Dell laptops to be the least offensive compared to all the other options based on price, features, performance and durability. We've tried cheap. We've tried expensive. We've tried other middle-of-the-road vendors. Dell was the best/least offensive.

I'm typing this on a Toshiba laptop with 4 dead keys which requires removal of everything internal, including the motherboard, to replace the keyboard ($100 for parts). Replacing a Dell keyboard (usually $25 for parts) is trivial in comparison and Dell does a great job of testing their keyboards for durability.

Hope whatever they do doesn't screw the quality/value on the laptop side.

Re: As a former EMC and VMware customer ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oddly enough, I perform firmware upgrades on our EMC platforms routinely, on the fly, with zero downtime.

: I only have one question

[Anonymous Coward]

Same thing happened w Intel/McAfee. McAfee internally was running around trying to figure out how moves would sell more chips. Ironically , one of the subjects never to be spoken about was the security if the chip. Heh.

DeWalt selling McAfee to Intel was great for him and the McAfee shareholders at the time, but dicked McAfee customers, employees and even Intel.

I cannot imagine what it's like internally at vnware-dell-EMC.

VMware is going to be predated on by docker/k8s.

Dell will need to sell more racks of servers to a growing segment, but a very small set of cloud providers. Ditto emc

What Dell will do with RSA is unknown. Probably spin it out ? It doesn't fit, and as the numbers showed Dell secure works was losing money consistently.

Re:: I only have one question

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell EMC employee here . . . it's going fine. We hit our numbers and people are happy AFAIK.

You'll forgive me if after 8 years

[rsilvergun]

of constant productivity increases being told 'raises will come' rings hollow. GDP or not we'd recovered from the 2008 crash in less than 2 years. Wages dropped like a rock then as everybody (except CEOs) took paycuts. Every day I turn on the news and the stock market's hitting records but boo-hoo-hoo the GDP means we can't raise wages, meanwhile I read stuff like this

We're in full trickle down mode (minus the trickle down, which never happens, just ask Kansas). This is what happens when you give all the money to 1% of the country. GDP _can't_ grow because all the capital is tied up in offshore bank accounts. If you let them the Aristocracy will roll us back to another Dark Age, not out of spite, but because they'll claim all the money for themselves and our entire economy will grind to a halt.

I'll remind you that the best times in American Economic history were when we had a 90% top marginal rate.

Re:You'll forgive me if after 8 years

[bobbied]

Oh please spare me the Social utopian clap trap and class envy. It doesn't help your case.

On most of this we disagree. I guess we will simply have to wait and see if the "trickle down" part actually works. I think it will, you don't. Seems that it's doing pretty darned good right now and things are looking to get better, but you don't. So let's discuss how things are going in two more years or so...

Also, remember one simple fact.... Bulls and Bears are both eventually right. Which means that if you stick with your "It's going to crash!" mantra long enough, it's going to be true. The issue here is if the theory that we used to generate our forecast actually works. I dare say yours doesn't. I remember the hordes of prognosticators that said the Republicans and Trump would kill the stock market and the economy with their reckless policies all though the election and into the first year of Trump's presidency. This was based on your theories. Problem is, the forecast has so far been totally wrong. Could it be there is actually some truth over here on the right? I see evidence of it myself.

Shall we agree that "time will tell"?

Re:I want VMWare to add native CEPH storage to esx

[Anonymous Coward]

Dumbest. Idea. Evar.

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is something that *may* happen as reported by an *anonymous source.* It would be a move that didnâ(TM)t make a lot of sense. The company had a great year and has been paying down debt ahead of schedule. Thereâ(TM)s no point in wasting time on such thin speculation.

Predicted in 2013

[packrat0x]

As predicted by My Comment back in 2013.

Unfortunately, these "going private" deals usually end with an IPO 2-3 years later. Same old compay with extra debt! The refinancing will make no difference to Dell, since "providing useful products and services at a profit" is what management should be concentrating on.
1) Use other people's money to buy up company
2) Pay self fees for being the Buyout fixer (Profit $$$)
3) Wait 2-3 years
4) Perform IPO
5) Pay self fees for being the IPO fixer (Profit $$$)
6) Sell new shares (Profit $$$)

Dell went public already... then went back

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell only went back to being a private company only four years ago.