Techstrong Gang – March 14, 2024

Happy Thursday, everyone. You know, it's, it's a, it's a little bit of a popery. Thursday, we we're gonna be discussing a bunch of great stuff here on Textron Gang.

We've got open source business models, observability, what's going on at Broadcom, and even a little bit about ha a, how AI is affecting the job market. All that, and more here on Textron Gang. Hey, I am Alan Shimel, CEO of Textron Group, here in Boca Raton at our Techron headquarters Studios for this Thursday edition of Textron Gang.

The rest of the gang for today is remote. Let me quickly introduce him to you. First of all, joining us from all the way out in la, uh, our good friend Bob Ruman, fellow and gang member.

Hey, Bob, welcome and thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. Pleasure.

Uh, just moving west to east. Well, next stop in San Angelo, Texas, where our, uh, editor Amanda Razani resides. And Amanda, welcome.

Hello. Happy to be Here. Thank you.

And then, uh, making a rare, rare appearance from his haunts up in New York. Our Chief Content Officer, Mike Vizard. Hey Mike.

Welcome. Hey guys. How you doing?

Good. Alright, so let, let's dive into what we've, what we're doing today. I'm going to audible a little bit.

I wanna start off with an article that I, I came to my attention this morning out of the Ink magazine. And it, it was basically a, um, a analysis that was done of job listings, not really gig listings, let's call them on Upworks, right? Because the premise is that, uh, contracting jobs are much more, uh, sensitive to changes in job market before we see it in real, you know, full-time positions.

And so they looked at what jobs have been changing, or what job listings have gone up or down with the rise of ai. And surprisingly, as, as you may or may not think, video editing videographers have not really changed in terms of the amount of listing coding. Both front end backend web coding has not really changed in the amount of listing.

So what really, what has really changed, well, sorry for all of our tech strong, uh, writers out there, but it seems writing gigs are down by 33%. Now that's, that's sizable. That's sizable.

I'm gonna throw it out too. We've, we've got three folks who write for us here. What do you, what do you guys think?

Well, So, so my question is, is, is this just the, the canary and the coal mine? And everybody else will be seeing the same thing shortly? 'cause if I look back at these AI platforms, they're very text driven, and the easiest place to apply them is naturally writing.

I think, um, we're gonna see more developers using these tools to write code. So I don't know if people are contracting development work anyway, because they don't have developers on staff. But that's always been, um, an issue in the development space because a lot of people prefer to hire developers as contractors.

And maybe they're using the AI tools in video. It's still early days, but I think that's all coming. We've all seen at least demos of things that people are working with.

Um, Atlassian is just today showing a, a tool that they came out with, which lets mere mortals edit videos before they send them out asynchronously to show somebody how something works. And, um, that may reduce the need for videographers. Who knows?

I just think the whole thing is constantly evolving. I, I'm not sure that a lot of the writing gigs that people were posting were high value writing gigs. So, you know, we'll see where we go.

Amanda, what do you think? Well, first of all, I have to say that I love Upwork. That is how y'all found me is through Upwork.

So, um, and it's a great platform. And I have to say, um, whereas I do love, um, chat GPT and other AI tools as tools, I feel that there's still a lot to be said from the human and creative element that you're just not gonna get from ai. So I think there's a lot of writers, they're not gonna be able to be mimicked or copied at this time by ai.

Now, maybe down the road, yes, but I can still often tell the difference between something written by an individual and the ai. So I think there's some, some, uh, a long road ahead before it could just totally replace the human element. Uh, Bob carried to weigh in.

Oh, allow me to weigh in. Uh, yeah, I'm not surprised. I'm, I'm not surprised.

I mean, we, we knew this was gonna happen. Um, as Amanda said, I think one thing that AI's not really good at yet is telling, telling a bad joke, let alone telling a good joke. And, and that, and that just goes back to voice.

There, there's still, when you, when you read an article by, by an experienced writer, you want the article to be engaging. Okay? And, and so AI is still having a little pro problem with that.

So the people that live in that area, which I do, I mean, I'm still getting writing work. I, I haven't had a problem, but again, I tell bad jokes, so mm-hmm. People seem to want that.

Um, that hasn't worked. But a, a again, I'm not surprised where it's really gonna impact other than writers, is I'm waiting for, uh, because I live out here, I live five minutes from Sony Studios is where it's gonna start hitting. Um, it's gonna start hitting commercial, uh, television and commercial movies.

Uh, and we saw that. I was watching, I was watching Halo, right? And if you look at Halo, uh, there's only, there's only maybe, you know, 6, 6, 6 people that are principles in that.

And everything else is graphic generated, graphic generated content based on the video game. And we're gonna start seeing more of that. And it, it's been happening with animation.

So, to wrap it up, I'm not surprised. Am I sad about it? Yeah.

What are, what are all the people that are, you know, studying to becoming writers in college or technical writers gonna be doing with their life? Well, you know, there's still need for electricians. What can I say?

You know, I would love to get some insight into what kind of writing gigs we're talking about. 'cause when I look at Upwork, there's a lot of these technical writing projects, you know, where it's basically here, take my documentation and turn it into something that can be considered a document that somebody would use for training or whatever. Frankly, AI might be better at that stuff.

So we'll see. Well, If, yeah, I think it's better at dry content, like dry totally informational content. Yeah.

But anything above that, no, I, If it's accurate, I've, I've still had trouble, I've had trouble with AI accuracy. I, I still do a lot of coding. And what, and I do put jj I do, I'll, I'll do, I tend to use other platforms other than chat GPT.

But I'll say, okay, show me how to do X, y, z uh, show, show me how to use, use generics and TypeScript in this situation. And I get back an answer and it looks good. And then you try it and you realize it doesn't work.

So obviously it didn't, um, plagiarize the right code. Uh, so there's still that issue. You're still gonna need that need for quality assurance, particularly in complex technical writing.

Like, would I really want AI writing, uh, the technical documentation for doing, uh, micro, micro heart surgery? Um, wonder about that? All right, Alan, you started this masque.

Yeah, no, I, you know, I was, I was interested to, you know, because there's some self-dealing here, right? We all have an interest in this. Look, I, I, Mike, I don't think you're wrong.

I, I think writers are not the tip of the, uh, tip of the spear. They're at the tip of the spear of this AI functionality, because it is probably the easiest thing to do is just say, Hey, write me an article or write me this, or write that, or rewrite this or edit that. Um, I don't think things like video editing and so forth, or far behind or image editing.

And, and quite frankly, I don't think coding is that far behind that either. These are gonna be just one domino after the next falling. Um, I will tell you, yes, sometimes you could more than sometimes oftentimes you could definitely tell if something was written with AI or had, you know, has AI fingerprints on it.

That doesn't necessarily make it better or worse than a human written one. I, I've used it to write emails and other things where it does a much better job than I would've. But, um, anyone who sits there, you know, and we've had this discussion, that's why I brought it up.

We've had this discussion on Techron Gang, we're gonna 10 x everyone. It's not gonna cost anyone their jobs. Yes, there're gonna be some jobs that are lost to ai.

I, I think we've gotta face that. And whether they're in writing or video editing or coding or lawyers or doctors or whatever, that's the fact. But it overall, it's probably, it's still, I say going to create more jobs than it takes.

And I, I guess we'll leave it at that. What do you think? There you go.

Alright, let's move on to the first official block of the show. Sure. com talking about what's going on in the open source world with all these business models that are shifting around as companies try to figure out how to make some money.

And Alan, I know you've been tracking this space, so what's your perspective on what's going on here and what should people be? Actually, you know, I, I've been tracking the open source world for 20 something years. I've been involved in it for a very long time, especially open source security.

The, the, the issue is the open source model for, for many, many years, all we ever heard was the only company that really did well in open source was Red Hat. Well, then the whole cloud native movement came along and the foundational era of open source. And we started seeing a lot of companies, you know, with what were considered successful business models.

MuleSoft, for instance, uh, really we can name more, but I think what what's gone on here is funded in an era of no, in, you know, free money, low interest rates and all. You can get away with a certain amount, but when, when the going gets tough and, and the bean counters get involved, a business model that says 98% of the people who use your software aren't gonna pay you for it is a tough pill to swallow. It's a tough way to, it's tough road to hoe.

com, uh, including HashiCorp and even Red Hat, the, the open source, you know, darling itself have realized that, okay, we're gonna still let people get their hands on software, but we're gonna have to keep some of the goods behind the paywall. And I call it a paywall. 'cause that's what it is, right?

You're gonna have to be a commercial customer to get some of the functionality, some of the access that, that you may want. And, and, and it may be that, look, not everyone wants that functionality. Maybe only 20% do, or 15%, but that's still a hell of a lot better than the three or 4% in, in the average kinda open source business model who, who wind up paying for software.

I, I think we're gonna see more and more of this. Bob, will people go elsewhere, or will they pay for the fee in the, Oh, I don't know. Uh, I mean, again, the question is where, who is for me is who is open source meaningful to, right?

And so when you look at something like, let's, you know, red Hat or something like Kubernetes, Kubernetes is terribly complex, right? So somebody, somebody off the street, are they really gonna fort Kubernetes and create a better Kubernetes? That's a hard one.

So it really is, where's the impact gonna be? Where's the impact gonna be? Is it going to slow down overall innovation, that's gonna be an interesting take.

Will, will, will the product, will, will the product life cycle start getting longer again? You know, will we be, instead of taking, you know, six months to release a major piece of software, is it now gonna go back to taking two years because of all the corporate administrivia that goes with it? Um, is it, uh, uh, is, is it not bad, bad PR is not the right word, but is it the end of an year?

Might be. It might be. But is, you know, Alan says people gotta make a buck.

Yeah, people gotta make a buck. And there's only so many graduates, you know, postdoctoral students out there that have the time to actually create, you know, complex software and put it out there for free. That that's it in the, you just hit it on the head, Bob, when you have companies producing open source software as a business model, you can't take the business out of the model.

Right? If, if it's a, if it's a school project or a postgraduates degree and a labor of love, that's another story. Um, but Mike, to your point, I don't think people are gonna say, well, now that they're charging me, I'm gonna go look for something else.

There is nothing else they're gonna pay if they need that functionality, right? Very few people are capable of saying, screw that. I'll take the open core, open source, fork it, modify it, build off of it.

They don't, most people use open source the same way they use, you know, commercial software, which is they take the wrapper off and go, This whole conversation is playing out in the AI space, Amanda. So, you know, what are you saying? Yeah, that's what I was gonna say is I think it comes down to, to any resource that you're initially offered for free.

If it is valuable enough, like Bob said, you're gonna be willing to pay for it. So we can see that example simply with OpenAI and chat GPT, it was free. Everybody loves it.

Everybody's willing to pay for it, including myself. Um, and, you know, any, and I think that's the way it's gonna go because it costs money to keep these, these projects going a lot of money. And, um, so I think you're gonna see less and less open, you know, of the open stuff because it, you know, they need to make an income.

Yeah. But I think the price point might drop because there are open LLMs for just about every function you can think of these days. And ISVs are just gonna drop those things in their applications, and they'll probably charge something for that privilege.

But I don't think it's gonna be, uh, you know, 20 to 40 bucks a month to Microsoft for every user kind of thing. We'll see. I I know It'll go ahead.

It'll be interesting to see how, um, the VCs take this. I mean, right now, if you go go to, you say, okay, I have a great new database, and I, I have a great new, new idea for a database, you know, and I need 40 million to start. And you go to the VCs and the VC says, okay, great new idea for database 40 million to start.

How are you gonna distribute it? Well, I'm going to do, I'm gonna open source it, okay. And I'm gonna build a community around it.

And then the VC says, no, you're not. Right. Then it becomes, that becomes an interesting dynamic right now.

A lot, there's a lot of VCs that'll, that'll still buy into it, but how many are stuck gonna stop and say, no, every, we only support private, we only support private code. Now, that'd be interesting to watch. All right, Alan, last word on this particular subject, I, you know what I, I think I said my last word, but you can't take the business out of the business model anymore.

Um, you know, we, to Bob's point about the end of an era, look, I, I, I called it the foundational era of open source, where you had the Linux Foundation and CNCF and all of these not-for-profits that were shepherding these, these projects. And oftentimes there was a bevy of, of commercial companies that were, you know, profiting by letting the Lenox Foundation deal with the cost and the complexity of maintaining an open source project. Um, I, I, I'm not saying that's not viable, it is viable still, but you know, the, for the business to, to stay in it, there's gotta be profit.

And, and the model right beforehand was just too razor thin. So I think that's the world we're going to, and so be it. All right, folks, we're gonna come back in a minute.

I would just point out one last thing on this subject. 80% of the software we're using today has got open source components in it from somewhere. So, um, if we have to start paying for all that, the price of software is gonna go through the roof.

All right. We'll be back in a minute. All right.

All right, folks. We're back. And we're talking about observability, which in a lot of cases is starting to feel like too much of a good thing.

The issue is that, um, as we start to apply these observability platforms to collect everything from traces and metrics and logs that we're storing in a massive amount of information, and all these modern cloud native applications have microservices, and each one kicks off a boatload of data that you're supposed to collect. The issue is organizations are not collecting all that data 'cause it's too costly to store it all. So they are, uh, collecting it, shall we say, intermittently.

In other words, basically too expensive to analyze the data so they stop collecting the data, which kind of defeats the purpose of observability. We're seeing everybody from Sumo logic to startups like observe, change their licensing terms for storage to kind of address this issue. But, um, Alan, I'd love to get your take on what you think is going on here, but it seems like, uh, we've reached a point where, uh, observability is being held back simply around cost issues.

You know, what, uh, a rose by any other color would smell as sweet or cost as much? Um, this is something that is plagued, you want to call it log collection, data collection. I mean, it was, you know, Splunk, for as great a business as Splunk was, there was a whole ecosystem of players underneath Splunk who, who would collect and store the data cheaper than Splunk could or would.

Um, the problem with, as observability has given us the ability to observe more, right? To gather more data, to make more analysis and more observations, the more part of it costs more money. And, you know, it's interesting, I've seen some companies, and I, I'm trying to remember off the top of my head, some of the startups that actually do observability in a more efficient way.

They look at the data as it's being collected, take what they think, you know, what their algorithms tell them is necessary and purge the rest so that you wind up only having new analyze store a 10th of, of, of everything. But there are some people who just do wanna store everything. 'cause they may need it for forensics or whatever, you know, f further down the road.

But fundamentally, observability is a big data play. You can't do observability without it. And big data costs money, you know, when that, you know, there's been this kind Moores law where, where storage of data, the cost of storing data has gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper depending on what kind of, you know, recall and how fast it is and, and all of that.

But as that has come, it hasn't kept pace with the amount of data that we, we want to store, right? We wanna store everything. And, and so there's been a data explosion.

And so at some point I think people are gonna have to make some choices about what they want to store, what they want to observe, and how long they want to keep data. Bob, we've been talking about monitoring forever and a day, and arguably observability has always been a core tenant of DevOps. But in your mind, do you make a distinction between observability and monitoring and what people have been doing historically as a developer?

And, and what are you looking for? What Am I looking for? I'm looking for data that makes sense.

Okay. And, uh, you know, the joke, and when I got this topic yesterday, I was looking, I saying, well, you know, what, what could I say about this? Well, you know, data, data everywhere, but you marry a log entry that makes sense.

So it, going back to what Alan says, we know we have to look at stuff coming in and is this meaningful to me and should I store it? And, uh, another part of me is saying, you know, do you know cheaper? You know, I bought my, my first hard drive back in, in 1980, and I paid, uh, $200 for like something like 20 megabytes, and now I can run down the best buy and buy, buy a terabyte for a hundred dollars.

I mean, gimme a break. Oh, tell me, tell me your tale of woe of storing a terabyte of data too much. I mean, come on, really get it.

But, but, but let me, but Bob, it's all relative, right? Yeah. Because back then, 20 megabits of data, look, you can install your os your applications and still have a bunch left over to store your data.

Today, I personally go through a terabyte, well, not quite a terabyte, but I go through a couple of hundred gigs, just want my own personal photos and videos and stuff like that, right? There, there is this inexplicable law, you know, like how, how, uh, gas will fill the, the volume of its container? Yeah, yeah.

Give us, give us a container for data and we'll fill it. Right. You know, and, you know, it's the, the growing desktop, you know, the, the chunk on your desktop Yeah.

Is proportional to the size of your desktop. However, there's not a lot of people logging video that I know about, right? Mm-Hmm.

There's not a lot of people logging audio that I know about, but I could be wrong. So we're still back to fundamental, you know, fundamental data structures. Yep.

Right? And so, right. And so I'm back to, you know, crime, I'm back to my Crimea River argument.

They, they estimate that 40% of all storage on the internet shortly will be medical data. Things like MRI films, right? And, and so forth and that, right.

That does cost money. But let, that's, but let, let's take it back to observability though, because Okay. Observability iss not, let's call it general purpose data storage.

Observability is, it's usually log files. Yeah. Right?

And those kinds of things, right? Um, you know, it, it's been a look, it was always, if you ever speak to people like Splunk customers, this was always a thing, right? How it, you know, the cost for Splunk was directly proportional to how much data you had it analyzed.

All right? So now you've come, the, the little theme for the show are the business models of these companies fundamentally flawed because they're all following the Splunk model where, you know, basically we're gonna charge for storage and data, and this will be great, we'll get 'em coming and going, and it'll be fabulous. And people started rebelling against the Splunk model, especially in the cloud era.

I think a lot of these companies just gotta find a different business model that doesn't include storage or buries the cost of storage somewhere in a way that I don't see it or feel it. I, you know, I, I think I said it right in the beginning. I've seen companies that are, there's this whole ecosystem of companies that are looking at doing observability in real time without having to store and then analyze the data later.

Um, I think ultimately what it's going to come down to is we're going to see the stratification of data. Some, some log data is gonna be very important, and I'm gonna want that close by in a very fast data. Other stuff I'm gonna archive and I may never use it for a year or two.

And then after two years, I'll purge it. Um, other stuff I'm gonna analyze in real time and, and get, and just, it'll never make it to the, to the other side of where I store the data and analyze it again later. I'll just have like, or do we come up with like lossless or lossy compression of data where we, we have the shadow of the data, but not the actual full data.

I think all of these things will, you know, the, the market is the mother of invention here. So you're gonna have all of these kinds of options depending on how important certain data is towards, toward you for you in your business model. Yeah.

I think as, oh, I think as AI is implemented with these automation tools, we will have more and more of that ability to filter through that data and then have less data that has to be stored. And as it, you know, just like with any technology, the cost will go down over time. I'm not sure I agree with this.

And here's my cynicism about that particular conversation. 'cause I've heard it before. And yet we need all this data to train the AI models that we're gonna apply to observability.

So I'm gonna get charged for the data that I'm gonna use to let you store, to train your AI model that you're gonna bill me for on the backend so I can be better at my gig. I think the cost of the data should be wrapped up into the cost of the AI model usage, and don't nickel and dime me. The death is, I guess is what I keep coming back to about these things.

Uh, I'm kind of agreeing with Bob here. I feel like these guys are just nickel and diamond, everybody, and, and, and they're trying to pick your pocket going in and out the door. Fair enough.

Yeah. And also there's, I mean, you know, pay me now, pay me later. Okay, you're gonna save on storage costs, but all that data analysis is compute costs.

Yeah. So that's not gonna go away, right? Mm-Hmm.

And it's actually the, there's a good argument to be made that the compute, compute costs might actually outweigh the storage costs. We don't know. We have to do some measurement, but there's another, there, I was watching the, uh, movie Blackberry the other day.

Mm-Hmm. And they were, they were talking about the demise of Blackberry. And they said, well, and why, why?

The guy goes to at and t and says, why won't you support us anymore? He said, well, the problem with the minute is it's only a minute. We no longer wanna sell time.

We wanna sell data rate. Yep. Right?

And so that's what it's really, what are we selling here? That's the, that becomes interesting. If I'm selling storage, I'm selling storage, right?

Okay. You know, then I'm selling story Questions. What if I'm selling analysis?

It's analysis. Right. And that's compute.

You're right. Yeah. If I'm, yep.

You're a hundred percent right. It's gonna be interesting. Hey, let's take a break here on Text Drunk Gang.

We'll be back with our next block in a moment. com is the number one online destination for DevOps education and community building. com covers all aspects of DevOps, including DevOps, best practices and tools, DevOps culture, DevSecOps, business impact, continuous testing, continuous delivery and more.

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All right, we're back here on the gang and let's move into our next block. You know, look, there were a lot of people who were scratching their head when Broadcom, one of the premier hardware vendors in the world, first got into the software game, right? They bought Ca was a big prize for a couple billion bucks.

I think it was 6 billion, 4 billion something they, they bought ca Since then, though, they've bought a bunch of other software plays, uh, VMware obviously being the big one there that they've recently digested, ingested, and now re you know, what's the right word? I'm trying to think of a word that's a little politically correct, but they finished digesting it and this is what happens after you digest your food. Um, but anyway, they've also bought quite a few security companies, right?

They Carbon Black Semantic, and then there was DevSecOps and other security functionality in sundry places throughout these acquisitions. Um, sometimes, you know, Hak and gang Broadcom have been very sharp in, in cutting these businesses, reorganizing them, selling the ones that don't make sense. Um, I don't always see the rhymer reason to it.

I'll admit that to you. However, he's a lot richer than I am. And, um, you know, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt as well as the folks at Broadcom.

Most recently now they have announced, and this is an article over in Security Boulevard, that they're merging the carbon, the existing remaining carbon black business with the, I guess it was the half of the semantic business that they bought, uh, to create a security unit. And of course, given Broad comes mo lately, people are wondering, is this foreshadowed then packaging this up for a sale? 'cause maybe they don't want to be in that security unit, in that security business.

I don't know. I I, it sounds pretty logical to me, gang guys, gang members, what do you think? I'm gonna assume that they are as smart as you're describing, and, and I think they know full well the implications of the, the moves that they're making.

And they must have modeled that out because I don't think they're just, I hope not at least randomly just doing stuff that looks good on paper. But there's a lot of turmoil out there now. I mean, there's a lot of customers are, uh, carbon black, that wanna know if they're essentially being abandoned and where they might wind up down the road.

There's a lot of unhappy VMware customers that don't like the new licensing terms because everything now is a subscription and, uh, there's no perpetual license on premise. And as we both know, most of that VMware stuff is still running on premise. And that gets people thinking about what are their options.

At the very least, um, I'm not sure who's benefiting ultimately from this, but I would look at the latest Nutanix financial results are pretty, uh, startling where they're up like 40% for the quarter. Um, some of that is driven clearly by VMware angst. Um, I think a lot of workloads might move to the cloud and on other platforms.

So you might see Microsoft AWS and Google benefit. 'cause a lot of people will accelerate a transition that they were kind of thinking about longer term. But from the conversations you have with everybody, everybody's sitting around and their hands going, I don't know what to do.

So, uh, they start hedging bets left, right, and center. And I think we've seen this before, Bob, but it is, it's at a level of unprecedented scale, shall we say. 'cause it seems like everybody's involved in it all at once.

Well, um, maybe, uh, maybe, uh, one of the things I did find encouraging every, uh, or encouraging about your analysis of the acquisitions is that there's a lot of language in here that we're gonna put money in. Okay, we're gonna put r and d money in and we're gonna develop this product line. Those are words.

I mean, you know, show me the checkbook. So my anxiety around any of this type of activities is leveraged buyout, right? Where we just buy the company and dissect it up, or we buy, we buy VMware and we just start chopping VMware up and selling it off.

That's not what I'm seeing. That's not what I'm supposing is going to happen here. So that, that's actually good news in a way that it's j just not a, just not a grab, um, you know, consolidation.

Yeah, I mean, consol, consolidation's been going on. It's beyond me. I couldn't, if you were to say, you know, Bob, we want, we wanna hire you to go out and buy two security, uh, two security companies, semantic and Carbon black and put them together in a compatible, profitable way, how would you do that?

I have no idea. I have no idea. That's just a very complex undertaking that I couldn't even imagine.

I couldn't even, you know, and so I guess above my pay grade a little, I'd be interested to know what has to happen in order to make that work and why somebody would contemplate that. And operationally what that means on the ground. If I'm, if I'm an engineer, that'd be interesting to me.

Here's the part that always leaves me scratching my head about VMware in general. Um, I gotta remember all the people who have owned VMware over the years, but the amount of time that it's been an independent company is, is small in comparison to the fact that it's been owned now by Broadcom, then it was Dell before that, and it was EMC before that. And it never seems to be able to stand alone on its own two feet for whatever reasons that baffle me and I, and I don't know if that's because the business model is flawed.

See, we're back to that term again. Or, um, if there's something else that goes on inherently with VMware and Hypervisors that just never allow them to kind of get to the level of scale where they could successfully compete as a standalone company. Alan, I don't know.

You've been watching this space. What's your, Yeah, I mean, look, I think this too issues here. We're discussing, the article is about security.

You are talking about VMware. VMware has always been a redheaded stepchild, right? It was bastardized outta V-M-C-E-M-C got bought by Dell.

It became part of Dell, then they spun out and Dell took it back, and then they spun out. And, and it's had that, it's had that though, because for a little side project, it became a damn big thing. It almost handedly helped usher in the cloud era.

Um, and the technology was always really good, right? Unfortunately, I think it was hamstrung more by a business leaderships and stuff like that, and that it was always somehow attached to EMC and then to Dell. I don't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

I mean, quite frankly, we've discussed this on the gang. I think Dell accounts for 40% of EMC, uh, for of VMware sales still, right? Because Dell sells it as the, as their big channel.

So, and I think Broadcom recognizes that, that without Dell as the channel there, what, what do they got? The same thing here for security, right? When we talk about Semantic, this isn't big yellow John Thompson security from 15, 20 years ago.

What they bought was, was it the, I forget now, was it the consumer brand or the, or the, uh, business semantic business. And it wasn't the digital certificates, it was a sliver of the semantic business. Carbon black Look, carbon Black really helped the, you know, uh, in, in terms of backup and stuff like that.

But, you know, and in that regard, they're a security company, but you know, they didn't have the, the semantic name within security. I, I do think that, you know, giving Broadcom's, given Broadcom's, uh, past experience and, and practice, they're packaging this up, they'll sell it to a PE or something, right? Who, who will come in here?

And there's probably, you know, the one thing, security is hot as always, but the one thing about this kind of security businesses is they, they're relatively, they throw off good cash. And so someone will buy it for the cash flow, right? This isn't about protecting critical infrastructure or something like that.

This is a cash flow play. And, and there'll be someone to buy it off, and that helps them pay down, I guess some of the debt they incurred in buying VMware for however many billions of dollars it was, It, it was multiple times of revenue. So they'll be, yeah, I don't think they'll pay that off on the current revenue Stream.

No. And not from Semantic and Carbon Block Black, but every bid helps, Right. Amanda, let me get your take on this, because, you know, we, three old timers are talking about this, and we, uh, I've been following VMware forever, but as you listen to all these, uh, financial Manipulations, does it, would it inspire you with confidence if you were sitting there thinking about what platforms you were gonna be using and who you might wanna partner with?

Yeah, I'm, I'm not sure, but I mean, we've seen so many d different, um, company shifts and, and plays. I'm not gonna say I can predict what's gonna happen. Uh, so I don't know who knows what's gonna happen.

All right, well, I think that was the wisest thing you said in this, Could have said on this statement here. Yeah, because the truth of the matter is, and Alan, you can close it out, but in my opinion, these consolidations are, you know, they're, they're part of the game that you're in, in the IT sector, and everybody that you do business with can be bought by somebody else. And even companies that you would think that are completely untouchable, suddenly wind up getting acquired one morning and you're like, holy crap, what are we supposed to do?

So, um, it's part of the drama, Alan. Absolutely. And let me just say this, this merging with Carbon block in Symantec and potentially selling it, it's not the last we're gonna see of sell offs at Broadcom.

I I think there will be huge swaths of the VMware business that are gonna be sold off, um, possibly even Zu, right? Which, so Then are, are, are you saying then, then they, they, they, not their promise, but they, they're gonna invest in r and d is just a ruse? No, no, I think, I think they will invest in r and d, uh, in as much as it makes that business more valuable, right?

My, my question Bob, is not whether they'll invest in r and d, but is it a long term investment? I, I don't think, you know, they're planning on owning Carbon Black and Semantic two years from now. So creating a new company called, uh, semantic Se Seman Black, right?

Se Black and sell it on Carbon Tech. Alright, carbon Tech, I'm not saying this is going on here, but I have seen it in the past where there's, uh, some funny accounting that goes into r and d dollars. So if I invest $1 and it gets used by six different product companies or six different groups within that company, it gets counted as $6.

So, Who knows? You know what, as I said in the beginning, he, they're smarter than we are. Let's see how it plays out.

But it bears watching. Hey, that's gonna, I think, call it a wrap on today's, uh, Textron gang. Bob, I thank you for getting up in the, in the dark wee hours of, of the LA morning and joining us.

Always a pleasure to have you on. Mike, I know you're on the road. You and I'll be in Paris next week for CubeCon and, uh, doing a lot, a lot.

I did I say a lot of Linux Foundation, CNCF interviews, that's their sponsoring the, uh, the Text Drunk tv, uh, program there. So it's gonna be great. Amanda, you'll be holding the fort down while we're all out where we are all out.

So do what you gotta do and we'll, we'll see you soon. I hope you've enjoyed this Textron Gang episode. Don't worry with Mike and myself and even Mitchell traveling next week.

Amanda and Sharon Florentine and the rest of the gang here will be holding down the fort. We'll have Textron gang episodes for you, as we always do every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Until then, though, this is Alan Shimel for Techstrong, we're Out.

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