VMware swears it will continue to support Fusion and Workstation after firing both programming teams
Well, this is interesting. VMware, despite a better than expected quarter, is cutting 800 jobs. While the company wouldn't say who it was firing during its restructuring, former employees quickly spilled the beans. The entire US VMware Fusion and Workstation developers were put on the chopping block.
VMware assures users that Fusion and Workstation are not on their way out.
According to former VMware staffer Christian Hammond's blog, "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."
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Others, on the anonymous site, TheLayOff.com, also reported that the "Entire Workstation and Fusion groups gone. Two years ago, the entire groups of Fusion and Workstation QA group were laid off in Palo Alto. The developers stayed at that time. Now the entire groups of Workstation and Fusion in Palo Alto are gone as well today."
Over the years, VMware's two desktop virtulization programs have remained popular. But they've faced increasing competition from Oracle's free and open-source VirtualBox and Parallels' Desktop for Mac. In addition desktop virtualization software, such as Microsoft Hyper-V on some versions of Windows 8, 8.1, and 10, is becoming popular. Still, both Fusion and Workstation have their fans.
Officially, Michael Thacker, VMware'sDirector of Corporate Media Relations told ZDNet, that:
VMware continues to offer and support all of our End-User Computing portfolio offerings, including development on future versions. This includes our personal desktop products under the VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation brands. While we are transitioning the Fusion and Workstation teams to co-locate, our commitment to Fusion and Workstation products is unchanged. Customers can continue to look to VMware to best run apps from multiple operating systems, and easily run Windows program on a Mac.
In another statement, VMware stated, "In some cases, roles and responsibilities associated with particular businesses will be moved to other regions and office locations. VMware continues to invest in all of its offerings across the portfolio, with emphasis on our growth products." So, what "transitioning the Fusion and Workstation teams to co-locate" seems to mean is that future work on these programs will be done off-shore.
If you're using Workstation or Fusion, should you replace it? Perhaps. On the other hand, Fusion 8.x and Workstation 12.xwill still be supported by VMware until February 25th 2017 so there's no rush.
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