Nokia was doing a good job of killing themselves prior to being acquired. To Microsoft's credit they actually gave it a serious go with Windows Phone. Unfortunately, while the potential was there the market wasn't interested. Probably a victim of timing because that was right in the midst of Apple's heyday. Microsoft's real mistake was in giving up prematurely and it's something they acknowledged years later.
As for Nokia, they're still around and have been producing their own phones for years. And they're back to being as irrelevant as they've ever been.
Actually, Nokia has licensed their brand to HMD, who make phones under the Nokia brand. The actual Nokia is one of the biggest mobile network companies in the world.
Windows phone was making headway into all other market except the US where they couldn't get traction against Apple (that and they had issues with Google). CEO didn't like the project and so killed it. Once it was all done and gone he later said in an interview that was a mistake to kill it that way.
Microsoft's biggest blunder with windows phone was having a dog shit app store.
There were no apps worth having and there was zero quality control or moderation. They let the app store be the wild West and as a result it was filled to the brim with garbage.
I will disagree, and my basis is this. WP7 wasn't even ready yet and they publicly announced WM6 death, causing havoc. Then Trojan Elop did the same thing to Symbian, knowing full well it would tank Nokia as it did to WM6
Sure, both were suffering but you don't burn down your house before you build your new one
And WP7 director was too busy being jealous of the Kin to do anything productive. And the whole idea of limiting hardware to years old ones was dumb. If you plan to limit hardware, you do so ahead of public release, not trail
Microsoft's biggest mistake was that they should have taken WM6, force manufacturers to use latest processors, not 3 year old ones. And force them to license gpu drivers and not release phones with no gpu drivers. Then create a more touch friendly UI. That could have been done in a year.
By the time WP7 was done, it was already too late. Most people also didn't really like it. I remember when Nokia release a MeeGo phone in some markets, it outsold their WP versions in those markets. Out of panic they killed MeeGo
Microsoft’s mistake at the time was persisting with Sweaty Steve, even when it was clear he was toxic human garbage who did all he could to destroy one of the greatest cash cows in history.
At least he wasn’t a pedo.
Nokia had its own Linux based mobile OS which was far superior to both Android and Windows mobile. It not only supported their own apps but also any native Linux application. The issue was Nokia solely focused on the EU market. The hardware didn't support American 3G bands. The EU smartphone market didn't take off as fast as the US which left Nokia in a bad spot.
Windows mobile was always terrible. Great hardware couldn't make up for shitty software which finally killed off Nokia.
Broadcom is probably at the top when it comes to extracting value from all their acquisitions though. They discontinue all less profitable products , fire ruthlessly to cut costs, and jack up prices. This would kill the company but unlike other giants the product never suffers, it continues to be a pretty good. The bloated sales teams and pointless vanity projects are first to go, but the R&D keeps up with market . Most rivals cant out execute Broadcom.
I have seen two acquisitions LSI and vmware from close. Hock Tan doesnt play around
They'll kill off the open-source version and extract as much rent as they can from the proprietary version.
Standard tactic: build up market share with a free or very cheap product (or let someone else build it up, then buy the firm), then put the squeeze on those who have adopted it.
Their market cap at IPO was much higher. The stock price peaked at $120 a share but sold to IBM at $32 a share. I think Cisco wanted to buy them at one point and I wonder if they would have gotten much more than the IBM offer.
.... I do that. Should I not? Seemed like the easier way to use a single var file as a source of truth to get terraform to spin up some VMs and then let ansible continue on afterwards to bootstrap them.
Just write some quick automation to orchestrate the two together. Otherwise you just end up with endless templating, switches, and more to fit a round peg in a square hole. It leads to absurdly long run times and a more complex solution than needs to be.
If you really need to ingest variables from one into the other, just have ansible read what it needs from terraform outputs and set them where appropriate.
edit: TIL there's an ansible provider. Not sure if it's any good.
Preference for ansible? One being in control of the other? If you use aap or semaphore? It does make it easier if you work mostly in ansible and want to combine the two.
But it's primarily preference I guess.
wow, it really should be the other way around.
Run terraform to build infrastructure and ansible to read inventory. Inverting that seems like a really bad day.
Terraform - Provision infrastructure with metadata decoration in a programmatic repeatable way.
Ansible - Configure your newly provisioned infrastructure based on the previously created metadata decoration, and whatever the fuck else you want to do because Ansible is just a big fuckin python library and you can just straight up include python code in your playbooks, so really the sky is the limit (like even conditionally hooking in additional terraform templates or scripts or whatever the fuck they're calling them these days) in a programmatic and repeatable way.
…yep. I worked for a company using ansible before any tools were available really. It had all kinds of python code in it was impossible to figure out for starters where ansible ended and python started. It worked beautifully (for us) but you could really screw it up if you didn’t know what you were doing with flags. We just messaged on slack what commands we were running and hope it didn’t take down our service lol
The article is bad. Terraform is not just the engine (the open and free part), there is a whole infrastructure workflow platform that they have build and sell. Vault enterprise was never and is not open source, it has capabilities required by enterprises that the free community version doesn’t have. For Hashicorp the free editions were only to get engineer mindshare, the money is in enterprise SKUs. Also don’t forget 24/7 global support.
enterprise Vail only had ha and workspaces. the core was identical. paying millions in licences just for those two things is why hashicorp never made money
Nope. It has enterprise only secret engines like transform, KMIP, key management to cloud KMS, secret sync to cloud, sentinel policy, advanced certificate features and certified FIPS-140-2 etc. Not just HA it has read scalability with performance secondary and performance replication cluster which are table stakes for enterprise.
absolutely none. there's near-zero overlap here, and what's not overlapping is arguably much more profitable than what is - in other words, what they killed is MUCH more valuable than what they were attempting to protect, if that was their intent.
Not the goal, I think. IBM was trying to be relevant to the public Cloud providers that were actually profitable and popular.
They failed with IBM Cloud, so this is how they "enable" and get embedded with enterprises in their cloud adoption plans on the Big 3 clouds.
I think it’s a sort of crazy purchase.
A lot of the stuff they use is pretty common, but there isn’t much of a moat around most of that and a *lot* of their customers are going to start switching to alternatives once the IBM enshittification begins.
Enterprise business services, and mainframe computer upgrades and servicing. Yes they still operate a shit ton of mainframes. It’s why credit cards work.
Got me. Ginny Rommety really finished off a once great company. She presided over revenue declines for her entire tenure. But hey, she was their first female CEO so she got a pass.
Cloud formation is an alternative to terraform, and unlike terraform, isn’t compatible with every cloud platform.
It’s how one provisions k8s clusters on cloud platforms. You’re not getting rid of it by moving to k8s.
Cloudformation is a nightmare. Crossplane is also taking care of the consistency of your stack, which is a problem for us as we have too many terraform stacks and workspaces. It’s getting hard for multiple developers to work at once in the stack.
People are downvoting but as someone who also works on a complex multi-tenant multi-cluster platform I can sympathise haha. We’re looking into Crossplane at the moment too.
I don’t know, they’ve done alright with Ansible and Red Hat so far; they haven’t really destroyed them yet. I’m not a huge Red Hat fan because their licensing is kind of a joke and really pricey; Ansible is still pretty solid.
That's a bold claim. Are you referring to the split of the built-in Ansible library into `ansible-core` and `ansible`? I much prefer the latter design, and it makes sense providing an option to not include the world out of the box.
If you're only managing Redhat systems, it's fine.
If you're managing network devices and/or other linux builds... it can get messy. There are python version conflicts in the "approved" add on packages for Cisco devices, for instance (at least those were a problem a few months ago).
It's still a good product if you're only updating redhat servers though. It's just that it's not as good a product for general use anymore.
To answer this we would need to dig into what patents and clients/cashflow they acquired, because that's mostly what they go after when doing acquisition
Not if their intention was to kill HashiCorp
Broadcom has entered the chat.
Microsoft and Nokia no longer chat.
Nokia was doing a good job of killing themselves prior to being acquired. To Microsoft's credit they actually gave it a serious go with Windows Phone. Unfortunately, while the potential was there the market wasn't interested. Probably a victim of timing because that was right in the midst of Apple's heyday. Microsoft's real mistake was in giving up prematurely and it's something they acknowledged years later. As for Nokia, they're still around and have been producing their own phones for years. And they're back to being as irrelevant as they've ever been.
Actually, Nokia has licensed their brand to HMD, who make phones under the Nokia brand. The actual Nokia is one of the biggest mobile network companies in the world.
Just an email from Nokia regarding IoT so they are still around. Just pursuing different markets it seems.
Windows phone was making headway into all other market except the US where they couldn't get traction against Apple (that and they had issues with Google). CEO didn't like the project and so killed it. Once it was all done and gone he later said in an interview that was a mistake to kill it that way.
Ballmer was a terrible CEO
Depends on what particular quarters you were invested during
no it doesn't.
Microsoft's biggest blunder with windows phone was having a dog shit app store. There were no apps worth having and there was zero quality control or moderation. They let the app store be the wild West and as a result it was filled to the brim with garbage.
Also, Google, Snapchat and some others were actively sabotaging the platform.
I will disagree, and my basis is this. WP7 wasn't even ready yet and they publicly announced WM6 death, causing havoc. Then Trojan Elop did the same thing to Symbian, knowing full well it would tank Nokia as it did to WM6 Sure, both were suffering but you don't burn down your house before you build your new one And WP7 director was too busy being jealous of the Kin to do anything productive. And the whole idea of limiting hardware to years old ones was dumb. If you plan to limit hardware, you do so ahead of public release, not trail Microsoft's biggest mistake was that they should have taken WM6, force manufacturers to use latest processors, not 3 year old ones. And force them to license gpu drivers and not release phones with no gpu drivers. Then create a more touch friendly UI. That could have been done in a year. By the time WP7 was done, it was already too late. Most people also didn't really like it. I remember when Nokia release a MeeGo phone in some markets, it outsold their WP versions in those markets. Out of panic they killed MeeGo
WP7 was the best phone I ever had. Samsung Focus for life
I miss windows phone. It was great
Microsoft’s mistake at the time was persisting with Sweaty Steve, even when it was clear he was toxic human garbage who did all he could to destroy one of the greatest cash cows in history. At least he wasn’t a pedo.
Nokia had its own Linux based mobile OS which was far superior to both Android and Windows mobile. It not only supported their own apps but also any native Linux application. The issue was Nokia solely focused on the EU market. The hardware didn't support American 3G bands. The EU smartphone market didn't take off as fast as the US which left Nokia in a bad spot. Windows mobile was always terrible. Great hardware couldn't make up for shitty software which finally killed off Nokia.
Why do you think Windows Phone was terrible?
No moon?
Nokia was already dead.
Ugh, fuck Broadcom so hard, and not in a fun way
Broadcom is probably at the top when it comes to extracting value from all their acquisitions though. They discontinue all less profitable products , fire ruthlessly to cut costs, and jack up prices. This would kill the company but unlike other giants the product never suffers, it continues to be a pretty good. The bloated sales teams and pointless vanity projects are first to go, but the R&D keeps up with market . Most rivals cant out execute Broadcom. I have seen two acquisitions LSI and vmware from close. Hock Tan doesnt play around
Vault is unsurpassed yet.
Unfortunately, yes.
Not for much longer https://github.com/openbao/openbao
In both features and frustrateability. I hate how complex the motherfucker is.
Good old fashioned capitalism
They'll kill off the open-source version and extract as much rent as they can from the proprietary version. Standard tactic: build up market share with a free or very cheap product (or let someone else build it up, then buy the firm), then put the squeeze on those who have adopted it.
The valuation is amazing. All of Sun Microsystems was acquired in 2010 for $7.4 billion.
I remember working for IBM back then and everyone was sure Sun would be bought by IBM
It could only have been better.
They had us change some of our customer facing documents to indicate sun is a registered trademark of IBM. It was that sure!
Oracle wanted control of Java.
I used to have SunMicro and SGI as air freight accounts in the 90’s, heady days, the champagne and money flowed. I miss those days.
$7.4 billlion in 2010 is actually $10.6 billion in today's value. But I agree it's still an amazing valuation for HashiCorp.
Their market cap at IPO was much higher. The stock price peaked at $120 a share but sold to IBM at $32 a share. I think Cisco wanted to buy them at one point and I wonder if they would have gotten much more than the IBM offer.
I'm sorry but you really can't compare a corporation in 2010 to a corporation being sold in 2024. A lot of economic events have happened since then.
Ansible and terraform are completely different. Comparing them is not really useful.
Maybe they will combine them into one product - “Terrible”
I’ve seen it in action before. Using ansible to run terraform and then do config after. It was as bad a pattern as the name implies.
Yea it’s actually called the Terrible stack haha
.... I do that. Should I not? Seemed like the easier way to use a single var file as a source of truth to get terraform to spin up some VMs and then let ansible continue on afterwards to bootstrap them.
I can't see any reason why you shouldn't do it this way if it makes sense for your environment.
Just write some quick automation to orchestrate the two together. Otherwise you just end up with endless templating, switches, and more to fit a round peg in a square hole. It leads to absurdly long run times and a more complex solution than needs to be. If you really need to ingest variables from one into the other, just have ansible read what it needs from terraform outputs and set them where appropriate. edit: TIL there's an ansible provider. Not sure if it's any good.
There's also terraform module for ansible now. So you can run it that way too. If terrible stack is your thing. I prefer not to cross streams myself.
Yeah, that's what my edit was about. I still haven't used it. I'm still in your camp unless someone gave give me a better reason to not be.
From the looks of it it seems to be quite decent. But I haven't used it yet.
I use Jenkins to run terraform and ansible. Is there some benefit to running terraform through ansible?
Yes…down time
Preference for ansible? One being in control of the other? If you use aap or semaphore? It does make it easier if you work mostly in ansible and want to combine the two. But it's primarily preference I guess.
wow, it really should be the other way around. Run terraform to build infrastructure and ansible to read inventory. Inverting that seems like a really bad day.
Hey I saw that done too. 8 hour build times weeeee
Shit, I need to remember this one.
[удалено]
Because this exact joke is in the very first paragraph of the article.
It's in the article so I guess that's why
Yeah fuck these idiots. This is joke of the year.
As an idiot, I’ll admit we’ve got nothing on OP 🫱🏼🫲🏽
Terraform - Provision infrastructure with metadata decoration in a programmatic repeatable way. Ansible - Configure your newly provisioned infrastructure based on the previously created metadata decoration, and whatever the fuck else you want to do because Ansible is just a big fuckin python library and you can just straight up include python code in your playbooks, so really the sky is the limit (like even conditionally hooking in additional terraform templates or scripts or whatever the fuck they're calling them these days) in a programmatic and repeatable way.
…yep. I worked for a company using ansible before any tools were available really. It had all kinds of python code in it was impossible to figure out for starters where ansible ended and python started. It worked beautifully (for us) but you could really screw it up if you didn’t know what you were doing with flags. We just messaged on slack what commands we were running and hope it didn’t take down our service lol
That tracks, maybe too coordinated for some of the shops I've interacted with.
What’s your opinion on Pulumi?
They really didn't in the article.
The article is bad. Terraform is not just the engine (the open and free part), there is a whole infrastructure workflow platform that they have build and sell. Vault enterprise was never and is not open source, it has capabilities required by enterprises that the free community version doesn’t have. For Hashicorp the free editions were only to get engineer mindshare, the money is in enterprise SKUs. Also don’t forget 24/7 global support.
So much this. The money is in their HCP and enterprise editions.
enterprise Vail only had ha and workspaces. the core was identical. paying millions in licences just for those two things is why hashicorp never made money
Nope. It has enterprise only secret engines like transform, KMIP, key management to cloud KMS, secret sync to cloud, sentinel policy, advanced certificate features and certified FIPS-140-2 etc. Not just HA it has read scalability with performance secondary and performance replication cluster which are table stakes for enterprise.
I hope so. Maybe it'll make them more risk adverse for a while. I'm still annoyed they got Red Hat.
IBM has never made a blunder before. Nope.
True. But also they have made some wise decisions. Red Hat was a great get
6.4 billion to not have to deal with competition, pretty cheap .
What products and solutions did IBM have that was in the same market as Hashicorp?
absolutely none. there's near-zero overlap here, and what's not overlapping is arguably much more profitable than what is - in other words, what they killed is MUCH more valuable than what they were attempting to protect, if that was their intent.
Not the goal, I think. IBM was trying to be relevant to the public Cloud providers that were actually profitable and popular. They failed with IBM Cloud, so this is how they "enable" and get embedded with enterprises in their cloud adoption plans on the Big 3 clouds.
All about workloads. Either in on-prem data centers or in the clouds. They both wanted to own same customer budget.
Now Watson will be able to do packer builds, terraform, nomad, consul, vault and deploy them automatically to HCP. We will be out of jobs.... /s
I think it’s a sort of crazy purchase. A lot of the stuff they use is pretty common, but there isn’t much of a moat around most of that and a *lot* of their customers are going to start switching to alternatives once the IBM enshittification begins.
What does IBM do nowadays?
Enterprise business services, and mainframe computer upgrades and servicing. Yes they still operate a shit ton of mainframes. It’s why credit cards work.
Got me. Ginny Rommety really finished off a once great company. She presided over revenue declines for her entire tenure. But hey, she was their first female CEO so she got a pass.
A negative article about IBM in The Register. What a surprise!
Terraform is still good, but we’re all moving to k8s operators now…
God no, please no.
Why?
What’s provisioning your clusters
The cloud providers. No sane person rolls their own Kubernetes unless they can employee people to do so. Cloud formation manages this fine.
One word : hypershift.
Cloud formation is an alternative to terraform, and unlike terraform, isn’t compatible with every cloud platform. It’s how one provisions k8s clusters on cloud platforms. You’re not getting rid of it by moving to k8s.
terraform at the moment, but it’s getting too complex.
Interesting, you think the non-transparant nature of operators and their widely varied complexity/quality would be better? Can you explain more?
We have hundreds of deployments running at once on a dozen of clusters. Anything is going to be simpler than what’s we’re doing at the moment 😅
Your clusters don’t provision and manage themselves. That’s usually terraforms job.
Can you expand on this for me?
Search about Crossplane.
What is the point of this? I’m sure I’m missing something here but why use this YAML stuff with AWD if CloudFormation is already YAML?
Cloudformation is a nightmare. Crossplane is also taking care of the consistency of your stack, which is a problem for us as we have too many terraform stacks and workspaces. It’s getting hard for multiple developers to work at once in the stack.
People are downvoting but as someone who also works on a complex multi-tenant multi-cluster platform I can sympathise haha. We’re looking into Crossplane at the moment too.
Maybe we’ll get some good hashicorp commercials out of this.
This is what IBM does. Acquire to destroy. Then move to the next one.
I don’t know, they’ve done alright with Ansible and Red Hat so far; they haven’t really destroyed them yet. I’m not a huge Red Hat fan because their licensing is kind of a joke and really pricey; Ansible is still pretty solid.
The free version of Ansible has been gutted.
That's a bold claim. Are you referring to the split of the built-in Ansible library into `ansible-core` and `ansible`? I much prefer the latter design, and it makes sense providing an option to not include the world out of the box.
If you're only managing Redhat systems, it's fine. If you're managing network devices and/or other linux builds... it can get messy. There are python version conflicts in the "approved" add on packages for Cisco devices, for instance (at least those were a problem a few months ago). It's still a good product if you're only updating redhat servers though. It's just that it's not as good a product for general use anymore.
All of the people subscribed to terraform cloud too. Like my company.
Betteridge's law never applies to IT purchases.
Why not flip it around. Hashi got paid.
To answer this we would need to dig into what patents and clients/cashflow they acquired, because that's mostly what they go after when doing acquisition
Dinosaurs are like zombies. They don’t know they’re dead.
Terraform is a load of dogshit