Earlier today, rumors of a rumored VMware force reduction of a minimum of 5% smoked the Twitterverse.

Almost immediately, Keith Townsend, @CTOAdvisor, asked the following question:

HPE, VMware/Dell, Google and AWS will all be competing for the same talent moving forward. Who has the better story to tell recruits?

— Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) January 22, 2016

That got me thinking.

Prior to his question, I had only looked at the pending acquisition of EMC by Dell from purely financial and efficiency viewpoints.

Keith’s question made me ponder the need for employees to think about employment stability, retention, and, for recruitment.

He’s right.

The four companies listed above are at the forefront of developments in enterprise computing. However, three others were left out: IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, in alphabetical order.

Now, you have a ‘Sordid Seven’ of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Dell/EMC/VMware – assuming the sale goes through, Google, HPE, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, of enterprise computing.

However, getting back to Keith’s question, the top dog here has to be Microsoft.

Why Microsoft?
Good question.

Microsoft has the entire stack: a client OS, a server OS, a mobile OS, a cloud OS, and heck, even a cloud OS. They also have a common codebase between the operating systems, a common hypervisor across the operating systems, a public and private cloud.

Moreover, they have embraced containers, popularized by Docker. Containerization is now a very integral part of Windows Server 2016, and the next iteration of Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor.

If you mix in the fact that Microsoft has gone past their layoffs, then Microsoft looks very good.

Standing in Microsoft’s way, are the traditional strength of EMC and VMware: they are extremely – extremely! – friendly to evangelists! In simply words, people just love to work for them!

As I have blogged on these pages before, the VMware ecosystem is vibrant, engaged, and quite helpful.

This is in contrast to the Microsoft Hyper-V ecosystem which is comparatively cold, unhelpful, and absolutely full of themselves.

Those Microsoft failings though, are nothing when it come to the specter of losing one’s job, or the more evil looming change of a job loss.

This, is where Microsoft wins.

And I believe, where it wins this discussion.

Am I wrong?

Please post a comment below, or tweet why you think so to me at @johnobeto, or send me an email john.obeto@absolutevista.com.

© 2002 – 2016, John Obeto for Blackground Media Unlimited

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