A distorted sense of reality

Realization of the end of an era?

Sometimes I get blown away by how detached from reality some C-level people are. I don’t know if it is because their big office’s couch is so laid back that they no longer can see far beyond the pile of papers on their desks, or because their ego makes them blind. No matter the reason, the truth is that that distorted sense of reality pushes them slowly but steady into self-destruction.

Latest great example was VMWare’s Senior Executives speech at a partner event this week bragging about Amazon Web Services.

Carl Eschenbach, VMware’s President and COO:

I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books.

This is a follow up from Pat Gelsinger -VMWare’s CEO- speech, who understands that every time a customer moves to Amazon, VMWare has lost its play:

We want to own corporate workload. [..] We all lose if they end up in these commodity public clouds. We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud and uniquely enable our customers with the benefits of both. Own the corporate workload now and forever.

Desperation? Feeling powerless? Realization of the end of an era, like dinosaurs watching the meteorite fall from the sky? Who knows. What is for sure is that Carl Eschenbach can start looking for a new job.

Header picture by ḊẠḲỌṬẠ