Apple OS26 Beta & GitHub Spark Breakdown | TSG Ep. 890
The Techstrong Gang dives into Apple OS26 beta—fanboys vs critics—and debates GitHub Spark’s impact on devs, security & software’s future. Plus, a preview of today’s TechField Day virtual event (9:30am ET) featuring Broadcom. Don’t miss it!
Today’s Gang: Alan Shimel, Jon Swartz, JP Morgenthal, Stephen Foskett & Mitch Ashley.
Watch the TechField Day stream: https://techstrongevents.com
Transcript
You have to be a fan boy to run the new OS 26. Maybe you're watching Tech Drunk Gang. Hey everyone, happy Tuesday.
It's Alan Shimel for Textron Gang. Welcome to our Tuesday show. Uh, you know, Mike Ard, we gave him the week off, so he wa he won't be here the rest of this week, but we've got some great people to fill in for, for him of John Schwartz, primarily one of our editors here at techron.
So we're looking forward to a great week of, of Techron Gang. Uh, we've got some great stories to kick off your Tuesday for you as well as some great people to talk about it with. Let me introduce you to our gang members in attendance for today.
We have Stephen Foskett, JP Morgan, Phil John Schwartz, and Mitchell Ashley with a feline companion. Hey, Mitch, how are you, man? Good, good.
I'm, I was just vibe coding. Sorry, I'm got here just in time. I got you.
She was vibe coating or you were? That's my, that's my companion Nate, my vibe coating companion. Okay.
Very cool mascot. All right. Um, so guys, let's jump right into it.
You know, John, I, I, I put up an article, uh, last week, uh, Mac, well, not Mac, excuse me, apple put up, uh, public betas, developer betas, I think is the official term for the entire portfolio for the, from watch to O to Mac, to iMac, to MacBook to iPad and iPhone, all the same. It's, they're all Mac OS 26. What do you think?
So it was interesting, I read your article, it was really, really interesting and, and in a sense, the iOS 26 be public beta was released, as you said last week, and, um, you know, things could change in the final release in the fall. We're assuming we're gonna have the new iPhones probably announced in early September. And from the impression that I got from your article is that you were pleasantly surprised as our resident Apple fanboy.
And what I wanna ask you about and kick it, kick off the conversation is what features stood out to you? I know we've heard about the liquid glass interface. There was always the murmurs about Apple Intelligence and to what extent it will be in the system.
I'm wondering about those two things, but I'm also wondering if there's one platform in this release cycle that stands out the most among all of them. Sure. Good, good stuff, John.
Well, I, I will tell you the liquid, you know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but in this be's eye, liquid glass is very pretty. It, it maybe takes a little getting used to, it didn't take me very long, and it is very pretty, but it's eye candy, right? I don't know if it actually enhances the user experience or, you know, more functionality.
Um, what's interesting is there's a goodie in OS 26 for every single platform, but they're not all the same goodies. So each platform has its own sort of unique goodies that are in there. Uh, for me, the biggest, you know, the biggest lift was for iPad.
It really has made your iPad into a, into a, uh, a laptop replacement. Right now, I, I have two iPads. I, I have the iPad, air, air, and I have the other Bo Bo both the 10, 11 inch one, not the massive one, but, you know, latest processors.
And I use a magic keyboard on both of them. I have magic keyboards, so it was already sort of laptop ish, but now with the ability to resize my windows, multitask, have two windows open on the screen at the same time, dynamically resizing them. And, you know, the, the, the Mac like ribbon where I can switch around, pops up, like, you know, hidden magic.
Um, it really does feel like I'm working on my laptop. It, it's, you know, and it's, and it's that 11 inch factor. It's light, it's snappy.
It's still an iPad when I want it to be, you know, a tablet, you know, a big phone, whatever you want to call it. But it really, there's nothing, there's almost nothing I can't do on my MacBook or my iMac that I can't do on my iPad now. And I think this is gonna set it free.
You're laughing, Steven. Yeah. Can I ask just one brief follow up and I'll leave, I'll, I'll get, I'll get outta the way.
But it, it compared to the last couple of years where we had a lot of incremental announcements, would you say that based on what you saw, you're more excited about what will come with an iPhone rather than say the last couple of years where it seemed to, to kind, we kind of got into this rut with Apple? Yeah, so I will tell you the big, the big changes in the iPhone, and, and keep in mind, I'm only using this over the weekend so far, right? The big changes I've seen with the iPhone, so big change for me call me shallow how, but, uh, when you're playing music, like I'm playing a playlist or a station or what have you, it actually, it doesn't like stop, you know, a song doesn't stop and then the next song starts in a second or two.
It has sort of a, like a DJ mix in, right? I was playing the, uh, the new Billy Joel, like seven hours that he released with his, uh, uh, the, the special on, on Netflix or wherever it was, or HBO Max, excuse me. And so he released this whole music, you know, con contemplation and it mixes it when I was on my boat Saturday playing, um, apple Music playlist, and it was mixing in, you know, from one song transitioning one song to the next.
That was pretty cool. Apple never did that before. But overall, I would say the biggest thing I've seen on the iPhone is despite what we heard, that there was nothing new in Apple Intelligence, there isn't anything big and flashy.
There's not, I I haven't played with Siri. I'm not a Siri person, to tell you the truth. Um, I haven't played with Siri to tell you how, if that's a big improvement.
But you could see subtle Apple intelligence, subtle ai, subtle, more intuitive, and grabbing stuff and making it more available to you easily in the, in the iOS. I, I would say that's the biggest change to the iOS, not the iPad, uh, os is, is subtle intelligence built in there. Steven, you, you were laughing.
You had something to say. Well, I, I, I am also a fan of Apple hardware and software, and I use my phone, my iPad, my Mac all the time every day. And I absolutely hate iOS 26 and Mac OS 26.
It's, it's, it's ugly. Um, it's incredibly inefficient in terms of space. Uh, the user interface metaphor makes no sense whatsoever.
Uh, you know, the, it's, it's unreadable. The things that I like about Mac O or about iOS, uh, and iPad os are actually some of the things you mentioned, like the windowing finally makes some sense. Um, but the, I I just can't get past the liquid glass.
The, the, all the UI elements are huge and waste space on the 11 inch screen. Um, even on a 14 inch MacBook Pro, the new beta of Tahoe, all of the radiuses and chamfers and popups and everything, they're so huge that they give you a lot less space to actually do anything with. And they're incredibly ugly and hard to read because, you know, the background is kind of bleeding through this alleged glass looking thing, but, um, it bleeds through too much.
So you can't actually freaking read the text anymore. I mean, I don't wanna sound like some old man here, but just give me a black flat background with white text or the opposite of that so that I can actually read it. You weren't Chasing any kids away from in front of your house this weekend.
Were you? Get off My on, Don't play on your own house. It reminds me of the Aqua UI from the original Mac Os way back when, which frankly is cartoonish and awful.
And, and on the, on every platform I've tried to use this new liquid glass. I just keep saying, what were they thinking? The the dynamic island on the iPhone in the last release of iOS was so nice.
It was this cool little blobby black thing, and it like expanded and contracted and had these nice little, but it was high contrast. It was readable, it was usable. This is like that, except if it was completely illegible.
Yeah. Coming from a software development, engineering background, I can't imagine. That's what I thought about when I read your article, Alan.
I, I can't imagine how difficult it must be to be in the operating system product group these days. I mean, we are how many years into operating system advancement, and it's like, well, we can't go and say we're not changing anything. It just, you know, would send the wrong message.
But the truth of the matter is, uh, you know, where where do you expect this, you know, the upward momentum of change to occur in, in metaphors. Now, what, what would've been interesting to me with this release, given all that we've had, you know, the growth in ge uh, generative AI over the, uh, past five years, what would've been interesting would be to have seen an operating system that actually more embraced dynamic behavior based on generative ai. Like learning about, you know, who you are and generating your UI on the flaw, right?
Steven, you're like, oh, Steven doesn't like this. Let me, how would you like this, Steven? Right?
I mean, to me, that's the next level of change that has to come and the little tweaks and changes and, you know, things that occur within the product group are just wasteful a waste of time at this point. You're just, you know, spinning wheels to make an announcement. Well, I think a, I think AC actually, apple Health has been leaking information to the OS group because every time I need to get my glasses upgraded to continue seeing the smaller and smaller user interface of the current products, uh oh, they're like, oh, we need to make 'em bigger so that the, I don't know which, which generation, but, you know, the greatest generation or our generation or the coming one, uh, can, can use these products now.
I, I think, I mean, it, it is said that this is done as a overhaul and just a major design change, design improvement. I think what's understated is they're trying to unify the UI across their devices to the degree they can. And you can argue whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, or it's the lowest common denominator.
So they all kind of suffer a bit to be able to support an iPhone and a Mac that has enough of the same similar properties. It does remind me of when Microsoft moved to the ribbon menu, and I hated it. I hated the ribbon menu, and I, you know, I lambasted Microsoft on, uh, network world and Computer World and everything I wrote for saying, this is the stupidest us stupidest idea.
We have to relearn how to use all your products. Well, now nobody thinks twice about it, and people come along with it. So we'll probably end up there someday.
Stephen May still hate it, but he'll, he'll get along with it. Okay. I think, Yeah, so Apple's uh, apple's kind of in this, this Apple's kind of in this conundrum though, where they keep getting dinged.
Every year they do a major announcement, not just to ww DC, but the app, the iPhone events. So in a sense, they're, they're dinged for being too kind of conservative and not doing, doing enough. And then if they try to do something radical, they're gonna get pushback.
It's something like Facebook never hesitated to make a major change. And whether the users liked it or not, that they would've eventually adopt it. I kind of wonder if Apple finds itself kind of in the same tension.
Yeah, well, I, I do think that they felt the need to do something different. And, and I'll, I'll say the smaller the screen, the better liquid glass looks. So on the watch, I haven't used it myself, but I've seen a lot of screenshots.
And by the way, six Colors has incredible reviews of these, of all of these betas. If you really want to hear a, uh, an unvarnished and in-depth review, um, it, the Apple Watch looks, looks really sweet. And I, and in my experience, I put the beta on my phone and I actually kind of like it on the phone, but then I moved to the iPad and I'm ki and I kind of don't like it, and I, the Mac, I really, seriously don't like it.
So I think that it kind of gets to what JP was saying and, and what Mitch was saying, that they're trying to make a unified user interface across all of these. But, but these devices are so different that maybe we don't need a unified user interface or a look and feel. Maybe we, you know, maybe we ought to have liquid glass on the phone, but maybe not on the iPad so much.
You know, I think that that would probably solve some of these things. And JP, if, if, if I had an AI built user interface, um, it would probably be black background with green text, like a VT two 20 and, uh, no decorations at all. So, um, have added AI 2270, we need, we need those back.
Yeah, good. And like I said before, go play in front of your own house, but I, I, I did put it on my watch. I've been running it on my watch.
Other than the numbers when you first, or letters, whatever, you know, when you go to log into your watch, I put in your passcode or whatever after that, I, I'm not seeing a huge difference in the applications what I did, you know, from a, from a, uh, a liquid glass point of view, from a functionality point of view. I kind of liked the, uh, the workout buddy. It was a little clippy kind of thingy, but, you know, it's, it's different, you know, way to go, Alan, way to go.
Um, you know it, but so I, I thought that the least, I thought the watch had the least kind of change to the interface from a glass point of view, though. There were, I, I've, you know, I'm, and I don't know this for a fact, but I heard the next generation watch is gonna be able to do a glucose monitoring, blood pressure and, and other things like this perhaps. And, and that'll remains to be seen.
But, you know, I, I also have it on my big iMac screen and my iMac screen. I run a two monitors set up with a 5K monitor next to it. And, and it does, it does not look comical on, on a real high res like that.
Um, but, but you know, as I said in the beginning, beauty's in the eye of the beholder and, and it does take some getting used to, but let me mention one other thing to us, and we, you we'll take comments and, and call it a day on this topic. I'm looking forward to the new web browsers from AI and, um, oh shoot, perplexity, because Open ai. Yeah.
From open AI and perplexity, excuse me. 'cause I am, I'm thinking we need a whole new paradigm. Are we done with windows and mice or is there a better way to Steven's point of communicating and your computer or device?
'cause we don't call 'em all computers anymore. Uh, are we are coming to a better way of your interaction with your device than clicking on a window or resizing a window or clicking a button, right? Have, are we moving beyond Xerox Park after 50 years?
Well, that's what I thought. Maybe liquid glass would be a transitionary interface to NLP. And it's not, I mean, maybe, maybe Siri will be better integrated into the experience.
We'll have to see. I'm as, I'm also not a huge Siri user myself, but, and, but there's been no claims laid that this is, this is their progress towards getting there. We'll see, but, you know, we'll see what the browsers look like, like you're talking about from perplexity and open ai.
Yeah, I, I would call out too, to Alan's point in the article, um, I do think that they've been making continual improvements to Siri, um, and a lot of the other AI features that have made them somewhat, slightly better, well, maybe not Siri, but many of the other ai. And another thing I'll, I'll point out, I am a big power user. I'm a Mac Power user.
Absolutely. Um, they've done so much more in Spotlight search, it's gotten way better after being way worse in the last version of Mac Os. I mean, like, sometimes it wouldn't even find things that it should have found that are like obvious, but, um, it appears to have gotten a lot better in the beta.
So I do think there's a a Lot of under the hood stuff. Yep. There's more.
Beauty is not just skin deep. Alright, let, let's take a break on that. We're gonna come back and kinda switch gears up a little bit.
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And, uh, for decades, the software development landscape has been largely defined by a fundamental tension, even a conundrum that this gap between having a brilliant idea then making it a reality. So developers have typically navigated complex set of processes, configuration, headaches, deployment pipelines that took weeks just to establish a, to establish before writing a single line of meaningful code that might end or might be changed significantly with GitHub's latest innovation called Spark, which col, which is designed to collapse this timeline from weeks to minutes. I want to start it off with, uh, jp I'm wondering if, if you think GitHub Spark, which I believe is available now in public preview for a copilot pro plus subscribers, represents a meaningful shift in how we approach application development.
Uh, this is not new. There are a number of startups out there that are offering this capability right now. There are a number of VS code plugins that have, uh, provided this capability, uh, for developers at, at, you know, at the moment, the Claude Code, uh, is one of the more popular, uh, tools right now that is in use that will allow you to basically submit a product requirements document and develop the entire application for you from, or at least a, you know, a rough initial, uh, you know, version of your application based on that.
Some of them that are out there actually will take handwritten drawings of what the screen should look like and convert them into react JS applications. So I don't see this as, as new, uh, or, or innovative in any way above and beyond what's out there today. Uh, I, I think it's interesting that it's kind of being what, if anything that's interesting here in this story is that GitHub, which has kind of started, if you remember from, you know, the replacement for CVS, the code repository is now becoming this hub, real hub for all aspects of development, right?
And that is, you know, all those other things I mentioned, they kinda leave you stranded in the process, right? You know, um, you're still responsible for building your DevOps pipeline around it. You're still gotta figure out how to, uh, address, you know, the changes that you wanna make, the maintenance of the application, how to deploy that.
Uh, and the thing that I think Spark will add or offer the users is the ability to, to kind of get all that running, right? I, I'm, you know, alright, spark, add me a workflow so that when I check in, it automatically deploys a, you know, spark, do this, you know, so it's, yeah, I got my app, but I also have the ability from within that environment to create the way to test and operate that new application. And, and I, and that would add to the services that are offered by some of these other startups that I mentioned.
You know, jp, as I think about it, uh, the way I see the market development, we are in a transition period, to your point about software engineering, there's kind of two main paths that are, that we're going down. One is the IDE based or the hybrid IDE where it's an IDE plus a, a chat session, an interactive session with whatever model that you're using. It can be through a web browser, it can be a plugin into your IDE, but we're still looking at code, we're still seeing it, watching it.
Maybe we're analyzing it, maybe we're not, but it's contended for more technical audience. Uh, then there's the no code audience, which is just gimme an interface. Here's my document, here's my requirement, help me build something.
That's the, the, uh, the, the Firebase Google Firebase studio kind of products. And, and some of them have that also within the IDE, but it's still an IDE. I think this is a very conscious effort and both of those are evolving at the same, their own paths because the IDE path is also dipping down into the CLI.
Here's now you have, yeah, at the C-I-C-L-I level as well as your IDE, there's a mouthful. Um, but, but going the no code route, I think this is very intentional by GitHub to attract or expand open the kimono to a larger group of users because GitHub does not attract non-technical users. You land on GitHub and most people would say, I don't know what all those files are.
It looks like a file system. What is this thing for? But if you go into Spark, it looks like building, it looks like a chat interface and for building an app.
Now they talk about micro apps, meaning they're not trying to get too fancy or sophisticated. So I think, I think that's part of the attention here. You could also see it as, as kind of an experiment, can they attract more users beyond the traditional developers?
And I, I do see this as a fundamentally different kind of product in that it is specifically designed as you, as you pointed out, not just to write the code, but to build everything else as well. So essentially you can say, um, I wish there was an app that would let me, I don't know, count my dog's steps while we go on a walk. And, and, and not just like, oh, well here's some code that could be useful in making that happen, but it'll literally like create the whole thing and deploy it for you in the cloud.
And then baa bing bot a boom. You're watching your dog's steps the next day. The problem is, in my mind that by making it so easy, and again, I don't wanna sound okay, I'm gonna sound like the old man yelling at people.
Okay, come on. Bring it, bring it. I can take it.
That's Today's, that's today's statement. That's, That's today's, that's your, that's your personas. I'm gonna get you a folding lawn chair, but it's okay.
But the point is, you know, I mean, by making it so easy to deploy, essentially you are cutting out any kind of adult supervision of that product. And I'm worried that what we're gonna end up with is people just rolling out all of these apps. I mean, you know, we hear about all these privacy data breaches and so on, you know, this, uh, recent one where, um, you know, women's driver's license were exposed to like four chan uh, trolls, uh, you know, things like that.
Well, I bet that that's gonna become a lot more popular in common if some of these ai, uh, driven apps make basic mistakes in their infrastructure configuration and database configuration and security models. Because there is no security model. It's just sort of like, yep, Bata, bing.
There we go. Got yourselves a database. Have fun with that.
So we discussed this on yesterday's shows, an article I wrote on, on Security Boulevard, which is the s in vibe coding stands for security. There is none. Um, but that, that being said, it is the, unfortunately, and I say this as a security person, this isn't new.
Whenever something new comes down the pike, security is an afterthought. Security is a bolt on. Security only gets built in when enough people b***h and moan about it.
And so we're not up to the b***h and moan except for Steven. We're not up to the b******g moan stage Yet. Wait, I'm gonna, I'm gonna defend.
Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna back up Steven on this. 'cause I, I had the same impression as like, and when we, you talk about speed getting there, faster, bigger, better, you know, there's always a, a compromise. There's always kind of a, you take a shortcut to something, inevitably there are consequences.
And I, I thought about the security hole here. So I I I, I totally agree with Steve. I mean, we all think about the security hole, but lay yourselves down on the track and see if that train stops for you.
I I, my money is, it doesn't, right? That train's full speed ahead and, and that, you know, as a security person, it's disheartening, but it's, it's what we've seen. We, you know, we saw it with a headlong rush into the cloud.
We saw it with, with every new innovation like that. I, in the article I mentioned 15 years ago, doing a, a podcast with the CEO of MongoDB and Couchbase, and I asked them point blank, there's no sequel, Stanford, no security. And they, and they, and they said, when our customer demands security, we'll build security in.
That's what the ceo and Has that happened because we got so many security breaches. Yeah, well, in, in no SQL databases, they have put in some security features. It's not as bad as it was 15 years ago.
But this, this is the issue. But, but make no mistake, right? Go west, young man, progress stops for no one.
We are gonna see a proliferation of vibe coded apps full speed ahead. Damn, the torpedoes, right? People are gonna do it 'cause they can.
And as a security person, I will tell you, the attitude has to be, we could lay down in front of the tracks and hope the train stops. That's not a good, uh, strategy. Or we could say, yes, we can.
What can we do knowing that this is inevitable? It's inevitable. What can we do to try to put in some guardrails to try to head it off at the pass, to try to anticipate what's gonna happen here and do something?
And, and I think that's the challenge to the security industry is knowing that we're going to, you know, this is like Saturday night, new Year's Eve night, amateur hour, all the, the kitties are drinking and jiving. What do you do? Are you trying to make me feel better or worse?
No, I'll, but, but this is, this is the reality of it. What do we do that you're not gonna stop them? The genie's out of the bottle?
Well, how, well, here's something I'd like to see. So this is fricking Microsoft. If there's a company that is mature about software development, it's Microsoft.
What I want them to do is I want them to put serious security bonafide days behind this application. I want them to put some real muscle and say, these things are gonna be deployed properly. They're gonna be deployed with appropriate security frameworks, uh, you know, a real attention to security and stability.
And in order to make sure that these things, and, and frankly, I think that would sell, people like me would love that. And people like you probably too. I mean, I can't imagine John's article about, you know, Microsoft promises to integrate security with all their AI coded apps.
That'd be a great article, wouldn't it? John? You wanna Write that one?
Yes. I think, I, I think it would be quite refreshing actually, instead of, instead of an afterthought. I mean, that's with the comment I think Al made about, you know, we'll get, we'll get to, it'll, we'll address that problem once our customer starts, starts complaining.
I mean, that seems to be the attitude it always has been. Silicon Valley Has been, Maybe rush it out then fix it later. I I was gonna tap into Alan, your, uh, your, your mantra perspective.
The trains left the station, right? This is gonna happen whether we want to or not. It has already happened.
I think one unique characteristic of this is people building their own apps, they're probably building it for themselves in a lot of cases. Maybe they're building it for their business, but if they're building it for themselves, they're putting information about themselves in it, right? Maybe my dog steps, but it could be my investments or something else.
And I think that may be an angle to appeal to the market, is if you're building apps for yourself and you want your data protected, we're Apple. We know how to do that. We're Microsoft, we know how to do that.
That's why you want to stay with us. As opposed to some whatever company that, you know, came out of the, the woodwork to offer the latest greatest. Yeah, that might be interesting.
But if you wanna make sure your stuff is protected, we'll make sure your app is built securely. But that's only one angle. It's, it's, it's not gonna stop everyone else from just building whatever apps using a web browser and whatever interface.
Security is a day two, day three thing, unfortunately, as much as we'd like it not to be. And Well, I do have announcement, Alan, I was gonna wait till the end, but since you and Steven were vying for this, uh, I, I think we're gonna establish the Walt Kowalski, uh, grand Torino Award. Get off my lawn award.
And this episode goes to, even though it's a second segment, goes to Steven FoST, runner up. Alan Shimmel, unless you do something in the third segment, I no, I'm a notable. We may have to revisit a notable runner up.
All right, look, it is what it is. Alright, let's take a break. But she Ever says in the movie, by the way, he doesn't say that in the movie.
Let's take a break here on the gang. Kudos to Clint Eastwood. Uh, but let's take a break here on the gang.
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We are back with Textron Gang, and we're gonna talk about a simpler, more focused VMware. At least that's the, that's the intent. So one of the benefits, ev evidently, of what VMware is trying to do is simplify their product lineup.
And, and, and the, so there's less variation across customers. Everyone's gonna be licensed for the entire VMware Cloud Foundation Suite, rather than making these a la carte purchases of combinations as was standard in the past. So I'm gonna throw it to, to Steven and ask him about this approach.
And I gather the idea is large customers would then be using the top of the range VCF, that would be the focus, I guess, from the company and what they're trying to do. I leave it up to you. Yeah, absolutely.
And, and we talked about this last Tuesday on the Textron gang as well, that essentially, uh, as we, as they said they were going to, Broadcom has focused VMware on VMware Cloud Foundation and has simplified everything. Now, that is remarkable. Those of us who've been in the space for a long time know how insanely complicated and confusing the VMware product lineup and licensing lineup was previously.
Well, now it's pretty darn straightforward. And I actually really like this idea that essentially, look, you're going all in on VCF, we are going all in on you essentially. You know, you're, you're, you're our kind of customer.
You're doing our kind of thing. So we're gonna build a product that is everything you want it to be and give you everything of that product. It's the opposite of the, the legendary like BMW heated seats, uh, subscription fee.
You know what I mean? This is basically, look, you know, if you're gonna, if you're gonna use our product and if you're gonna standardize on our product, then we're gonna give you everything and let you do everything with it, which is pretty cool. And, um, I've had the opportunity to be part of the recording of the Textron Tech Field Day event that's actually happening right now.
And, uh, as soon as you're done listening to this, I urge you to check it out. It's, it's available as well, um, uh, sort of post viewing if, if, if you miss any part of it. But essentially that's what VMware has done with VCF, is that they have built this thing, they stripped out a lot.
Yes, they've stripped out customers, they've stripped out features, they've stripped out capabilities, uh, huge licensing SKUs. And what, what remains is essentially a purpose built, uh, private cloud for large enterprise. And, you know, this thing is pretty impressive.
I, I don't know if y'all have, have checked it out. Any, anybody else be involved in this? And what do you think of this VCF nine trend?
I I, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Mitch, to jump in on this. You know, when I, I took over, uh, IT organization in 2010, and one of the initial things I wanted to do is how can we put our, our VMware infrastructure on a website or have something where it's self-service?
And so we're, this is that realization of that where now it's platform engineers, developers, you can even integrate Argo CD to do GI ops on this new platform, the VCF platform. So I, I think it's a very smart move by, by Broadcom to be able to say, stay home. You don't need to leave the town, the state, the country.
You can stay right where you are and you'll get what you want that you can get from a cloud provider on your own infrastructure, uh, to try to, you know, I would say stave off moving or for those that said it's too, too costly or too difficult to move. I really don't have to move off of VMware now. And that simplification of the product screw, uh, SKUs, excuse me, Freudian slipped there.
The, the, all of the SKUs that they had were just ungodly. It was like tracking Microsoft SKUs. It was, it was a beast to figure out what you gotta pay for and keep your cost down.
And, and it's funny 'cause people like to criticize Broadcom and say, oh, they're just extracting money from the customer. How's, how was the million different licensing SKUs any different, right? Well, the, the, the price did raise, let's face it.
But, but let's be clear, it's not just, you don't have to leave. You could stay here. You could take it with you too.
If you want to go to the public cloud, this plays really well and they, and they talk about their relationships with AWS and Microsoft and Google for, you know, taking, taking, uh, cloud Foundation nine up there. So, and, and especially when we live in a hybrid multi-cloud world where I don't wanna run one thing on my private cloud here or in my data center and run something else there and something else here, and I gotta learn three different things, right? I want, I wanna standardize.
I, I just want to quickly come back to the fact that, hey, if you are watching this right now, we're gonna end in three or four minutes. Head on over. com and from there it's the, the first thing right on the screen.
You could click through register for free and get right on there. You probably only miss the first session. And what's nice is all of these sessions are available on demand.
You can watch 'em in whatever order you want, actually. So head on over to Techstrong events, click through, watch this. If you're watching this on our text, drunk TV broadcast, obviously, which goes off, uh, Tuesday morning at 9:30 AM and it's about 10:00 AM now 10 after.
Um, but you know, it is available fully on demand. com, register and watch it on your time. You won't be able to ask questions and interact with some of the speakers and everything, but you'll still get the benefits.
Steven, what are there, five or six, I think different sessions here. Yeah. Um, yeah, so there's, as you mentioned, the first section is sort of the overall what's new session.
Um, then there's, um, you know, back best practices for deploying, uh, VCF, um, uh, more about the private cloud on demand stuff as, as Mitch mentioned, um, you know, the shift toward self-service, um, platform for developing applications. Um, my favorite, uh, unpacking storage, uh, all about storage in VCF and then finally, um, security and resilience. So, uh, all those different Again, last, last, Yeah.
You know, finally, uh, included. I I have a question before we go. Am I the only one questioning?
Um, since, uh, there is a good number of the product management team that stayed with Broadcom, uh, after the move and the acquisition is I'm, am I the only one that's questioning the leadership of VMware and not being able to, like the, if product manager was able to come up with this on the Broadcom, they must have had these ideas on the VMware and would, we're not friction between product. I don't wanna talk outta school, but you know, jp, that is a hundred percent correct. There were people at VMware saying this, uh, well before Broadcom was sniffing around the company.
Yeah. But sometimes it takes change to, to a accept change, right? And yeah, that's all true, but you gotta give, I, I think I wrote this on a social media post or, or in the article, I wrote a couple of articles on this.
You know what, for all those people who gave Broadcom grief that this was the death of VMware and this was going to make a mass exodus, exodus from VMware hang, and the Broadcom people are crazy like a Fox. They, they, they saw this had to be done and they got it done. I applaud them for it.
Um, head over to Techstrong events and check it out. Be your own judge. Don't listen to any of us pundits.
Um, That's pretty good Advice generally. Yeah. Um, all right.
Hey, I think that's gonna wrap us up here today for Tuesday's Techstrong Gang. I'm gonna be on the road tomorrow. John and Mitch are, are driving the bus, and, uh, they'll keep it.
I'm sure they'll do a great job. Jp, Steven, John, Mitch, thanks for joining us. Thank you for joining us.
You could watch the rest of Techstrong tv, but I'm telling you, go over to Techstrong Events and go watch the Broadcom event. Until next time, this is Alan Shimmer for Techstrong. We're out.



