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.
I was not directly affected, in this way at least, as I had already left VMware in 2013 to work on Review Board full-time. However, many of my closest friends were, and a product I spent 9 years of my life on may have seen its last feature.
I could talk all day about how I think we got here, losing this amazing team and these fantastic products. I could point fingers and lash out at those I blame. I could talk about how furious this all makes me.
Instead, I’m going to talk about the team and what we built — and I don’t just mean our products.
Let me tell you about our team
I began working in Hosted UI on August 23rd, 2004, as a bright-eyed 20 year old freshly dropped out of college. Back then, it was a small team full of amazingly bright and passionate people, working days and nights to build a product they believed in.
The culture at that time within VMware was just so fun and energizing. People wanted to be there, and were proud of their work. Features were brainstormed over games of foosball or DDR, designs discussed over free lunches and beer bashes. In the evenings, we’d order dinner in and watch Simpsons, or whatever was on.
Company culture changed over the years, becoming more corporate and stiff, but not Hosted UI. We’d work all day, with the occasional interruption for YouTube videos or some laughs, and at night we went out and had some more. Poker nights, movie nights, video game nights. Dinners out together, sometimes several times a week.
Many people came and went over those years. The team changed, though, for a software company, a surprising number remained until the very end. Even those that left kept in touch, joining for poker nights or dinners here or there, coming to the dunkings (if you were getting married, you were going in the pond), birthday celebrations, and reunions. We formed alumni lists and kept in touch. We hung out on IRC outside of work.
Through deadlines and downtimes, stresses and celebrations, our team worked and played hard. We were dedicated, passionate, and if you’ll allow me, we were damn good at what we did.
I left this team two years ago, but it hasn’t really felt that way. I still saw them almost every week. Our team didn’t have to be in the same building or even the same company to stay a team.
Hosted UI may no longer exist at VMware, but that’s really VMware’s loss. They lost one of the most dedicated teams they could ever hope for, the kind of team you can’t just hire again.
We built some amazing products
Workstation
VMware Workstation was the first VMware product (back then, it was simply known as “VMware.”). At a time when dot-coms dominated the Super Bowl and Amazon was all about books, VMware Workstation was letting pioneers in the Linux world virtualize their Windows desktop so they could run Microsoft Office instead of StarOffice.
This product evolved over the years with over 15 major releases, and more features than I can count, running on every flavor of Linux and Windows. It did this without falling prey to the bloat of most long-running products, as we focused not only on making it a more powerful product but also a more usable product.
Workstation made it easy to run complex development and testing scenarios, creating and working with several virtual environments all at once across any number of host computers. It integrated your virtual desktops with your host desktop. It let you take snapshots at different moments in the lifetime of your VM, and jump between them at will. It helped you catch defects in your software through remote debugging and CPU/memory record/replay capabilities, it helped you test complex network setups with virtual LAN devices, and it worked as a powerful front-end for VMware’s Server, ESXi, and vSphere products. And, in the end, it also helped you simply run your Windows programs on Linux, your Linux programs on Windows, or whatever you wanted.
Internally at VMware, Workstation was also seen as an indispensable product, helping other teams test features and devices that would eventually become selling points on the more high-end vSphere product releases. With Workstation’s ease-of-install and ease-of-use, people could get set up in minutes and get right to work.
We loved our product. This was our baby. We took input from marketing, management, sales, customers, and so on, but in the end, we were given a lot of creative liberty over the features and design. We were also given time to address technical debt, helping to get our codebase in shape for future challenges.
I don’t know how many awards we received, but I think it was a lot. I do know that we had so many users who loved the product we poured our souls into. That meant a lot, and kept us motivated.
It was, let’s say, a challenge getting some parts of the company to really care about the product. Workstation made a lot of money, but not the hundreds of millions the company would have preferred. This, I believe, ultimately led to yesterday’s sad outcome… Still, I’m very proud of what we built.
Fusion
Workstation was a power user product built for Linux and Windows. In 2007, its sister product, Fusion for Mac, was released. This focused more on consumer usage, helping people run Office and other Windows apps on their Mac.
At the time, Apple had just moved to Intel processors, and were touting the ability to dual-boot between Windows and MacOS X, using a feature called Bootcamp. Fusion offered a better way by letting you run Windows and MacOS X at the same time. It was popular amongst students who needed to run Windows software for class on their shiny new MacBooks. It was popular amongst developers who needed to run or test Windows or Linux environments while on the go.
Fusion was a very different product in some ways than Workstation, but it was also very closely related. While it didn’t focus on many of the power user features that Workstation offered, it did take many of those features and reimagine them for more casual users. It also shared much of the core code that Workstation used, meaning that features could more easily be ported across and bugs fixed just once.
Fusion was a reimagining of what Workstation could have been, built for a different time and a different audience. Like Workstation, it was also built by a group of very loyal, dedicated, brilliant people, the Fusion segment of Hosted UI.
While I never worked directly on Fusion, I did get to see features I built for Workstation make their way there, and watched as our users got to try them for the first time on the Mac. It wasn’t the product I devoted my time to, but it was one I loved, and one I still use today.
And all the others
Our small team has built quite a lot over the years. Along with Workstation and Fusion, we’ve also built:
- Player: A slimmed-down product for simply running and interacting with VMs, without all the UI of Workstation
- VMRC: A browser plugin and SDK for embedding virtual machines in your browser or other applications
- Server: A free product built from Workstation that offered remote VM hosting and management)
- WSX: A web-based service for running VMs natively in your browser from anywhere
- AppCatalyst: A developer-focused, API-driven development and testing service that works with Docker
I’m pretty sure there’s more, but those are the highlights.
These, along with Workstation and Fusion, were built by a team typically no larger than about 20 people (at any given point in time).
We did good.
Time for the next adventure
VMware lost a lot of amazing people, and will be feeling that for some time to come, once they realize what they’ve done. It’s a shame. As for our team, well, I think everyone will do just fine. Some of the best companies in the Silicon Valley are full of ex-VMware members, many former Hosted UI, who would probably welcome the chance to work with their teammates again.
Workstation, Fusion, and our other products may survive in maintenance mode, or they may disappear. 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.
And we can be proud of the team, the friendships, and the strong bonds we built, now and through our next adventures.
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Nicely done, my friend. This sums it up for me: “And we can be proud of the team, the friendships, and the strong bonds we built”. You and the rest of my coworkers are like a family to me. Professionally, my 8 years on the Workstation and Fusion teams were the best I could have asked for. Personally, the friends I’ve made while at VMware are some of the dearest and closest I’ve ever had. I will miss VMware. We tackled hard problems and came up with elegant solutions. But even more will I miss the special family we had in our little HostedUI group.
Wish you all the best, Jason.
Wish you all the very best, Jason. I was lucky enough to work with you way back in 2007-2009.
Well said. The silver lining here, I suppose, is that we may get to spend more time with our awesome friends – my company is hiring, as I’m sure many others are. In my book, you guys are welcome here any day.
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I am a long term customer of VMware Workstation and Fusion. I currently own several licenses for both products.
The first thing I want to mention is that the products just work. They provide an amazing immersive experience delivering smooth graphics and integrations here and there. I am deeply impressed by the overall product quality. I was literally infected by this invisible energy flow that could be read between the lines.
I am saddened to hear the news and it’s pretty sure that Workstation and Fusion are derailed in the long run. A bitter lesson to take: it is impossible to run the product without the people who hold the passion, expertise and overall vision.
What you described in the article is an inspirational working culture and a massive experience that created a huge momentum. Wouldn’t you mind to provide more stories and insights like folklore.org? Please don’t underestimate the importance of your achievements. I heard a someone’s saying that strikes the most: “The things we make for ourselves are lost when when we die. The things we do for others live in centuries”. This is so true.
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Great article. You indeed built things to be proud of. Wish you all the best in your next venture.
I’m totally in denial about this. Workstation and Fusion enable so much good stuff. Plus, they are the onramp that makes people want to buy vSphere. #soconfused
“And we can be proud of the team, the friendships, and the strong bonds we built”
Add: the products.
Fusion is essential to my workflow, and I truly don’t know how I’ll work without it if–as it seems–it’s about to die. Parallels is too buggy in my testing, and VirtualBox lacks adequately robust USB support. Fusion has been dependable and comparatively well-supported.
This sucks, for users as well as for the team.
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I just wanted to congratulate you and all the team on the fabulous work you did. I bought my first license for VMware Workstation Linux 2.0, back in 2001 ! And use Workstation and Fusion on a daily basis (See my latest blog article on http://éé.net/ak6), it’s just a critical part of my infrastructure!
So I’m sad for you. And I just wanted to say I love you for what you made available for so many people worldwide ;-)
Does it mean that VMware will develop pretty much only vSphere and vCenter from now on? That would be shame, I have been using Workstation for years, and it always has been a good goddamn product – I can think of very few applications so well engineered, you guys did a great job on it.
Ah the joys of corporate America. They can’t help themselves but to make stupid decisions.
As a guy who uses these products every day at work, I hope Microsoft snatch you up to help improving hyper-v
We are edging the time where hyper-v becomes a viable alternative for big enterprises and I think you can give it quite a nudge :)
Best of luck
I’m a VMware vExpert because I did my Home Labs using Workstation, or even Fusion sometimes, you helped so many Companies out there, not just power users, I saw some environments using Workstation at really high scale, insane but working!
You guys did just amazing job all this time. I just can say, thank you and good luck!
This is horrifying to me: I *live* in VMware Workstation, and have since version 2. ! Without it, I literally couldn’t do my job! And I know a lot of others in the same boat.
I’m sure we can migrate to something else, but that’s going to be painful.
I have been using VMware since its inception, and it has been & still is a superior product among its contemporaries. Its a shame when something so cherished,creative and beautiful is trampled down by Management because its not profitable enough. Its a fitting tribute to all HostedUI team.
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I have been using VMware since its inception, and it has been & still is a superior product among its contemporaries. Its a shame when something so cherished,creative and beautiful is trampled down by Management because its not profitable enough. Its a fitting tribute to the HostedUI team.
Its really no wonder now, why apps like VMware Player and Fusion just worked so well despite doing really complicated things. Kudos to your team for really being the best champions of your product and making the computing world a much better place (this is what happens, for anyone else interested, when keeping developers happy and engaged takes precedence over keeping salesmen happy and engaged).
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I just cannot believe a company would be so stupid as to let all of that talent go…wow!!
Big thanks to you all :-) I was one of those early users. This software changed life of many people for better. Sorry to hear bad news. it’s bad move to shut down this products and your team. This software is living ad for whole company, for many of us first step into virtualisation.
I still remember when you first blogged about WSX and I was totally floored by how technically impressive it was at the time. It’s really sad that VMware is gutting a team that is clearly so passionate and innovative.
I remember that well :) I wrote the post, went to bed (late), and woke up with a phone call. “You have to come in! You’re doing a radio interview in an hour!”
Half-asleep, I reached for my phone as I got dressed and saw your post, and others, all sharing my blog post, which I don’t believe I even really shared yet. Made for quite an exciting morning :)
It really is a shame… I hope VMware someday realizes what it lost.
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From what I have seen, this is just par for the course from vmware. They have no loyalty to their employees. They pay for it in other ways. It keeps the brightest employees out of their reach and costs them dearly later on maintaining a legacy of information that walked out the door.
A lot of familiar names in the comments here. My regards to the folks that were still around. Kinda felt like the writing was on the wall when all the Fusion and WS QA in Palo Alto got laid off, but the products held on! Fusion 8 is beautiful and this is a sad day.
Bunch of fucking schmucks. I love Fusion and Workstation. They save me boatloads of time every single day. I hope those affected find places where they can be passionate again.
Well crap, this makes me genuinely angry. I still rely on Workstation on a regular basis any time I want to experiment at home. Thanks to everyone who worked on the product, if it does go away I will definitely miss it. So uh…since I won’t use Virtual Box, because Oracle is…Oracle…anyone else have good recommendations for a replacement? :)
Thank you Christian!
As a member of WS QA Team (no such thing as FORMER in my mind) I appreciate your post and so happy to be part of GREAT WORKSTATION/FUSION TEAM!