This week’s biggest news on the tech landscape involved a federal court ruling against Google LLC in a landmark search monopoly case. The Google antitrust ruling impact was a main focus for theCUBE Research industry analysts John Furrier (pictured, left) and Dave Vellante (right) in the latest episode of the CUBE podcast.
“When the DOJ finally wakes up and realizes Google has a monopoly, and they take action against them, you know that Google’s monopoly has peaked,” Vellante said. “That’s a sure sign. The DOJ coming in late, as usual.”
Google antitrust ruling impact lands amid UK probe
As the tech world is trying to parse out how to understand the Google antitrust ruling impact, news also came down that the U.K.’s antitrust regulator launched a probe into Amazon.com Inc.’s partnership with large language model developer Anthropic PBC. It comes as Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI are trying to run away with the prize, according to Vellante.
“Amazon does a deal with Anthropic, doesn’t have a board seat, doesn’t even have an advisory board or an observational board seat. It’s just investing in the company, being a preferred cloud provider, collaborating, presumably, on improving Amazon silicon,” Vellante said. “Bellying up to a good partner like that, creating more competition to Google and Microsoft. I don’t understand this.”
Microsoft, Amazon and Google have been competing like crazy in recent years, which has kept prices down. Companies are bashing each other’s heads in, and technology is deflationary, Vellante explained.
“It’s like the only market where price-performance keeps improving, and yet competition will raise prices. It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “It’s not collusion; it’s just competition.”
Despite that, if companies are breaking the law and violating the Sherman Act, they should be punished, according to Vellante. But how can we best understand the Google antitrust ruling impact?
“I’m not sure what Google has done to violate that by paying Apple a bunch of dough, $20 billion. But what’s going to happen? They’re going to say, ‘OK, now you have to choose, as a user, which browser you’re going to use,’” Vellante said. “Everybody’s going to choose Google. They’re not going to choose Bing. I don’t get it.”
New cybersecurity landscape becoming clearer
Recent coverage from theCUBE of the Black Hat USA event zeroed in on balancing the complexities of modern cybersecurity. The big conversation involved AI, explainability, data and supply chain, according to Furrier.
“Security is a data and risk management paradigm at scale. We talked a lot about what happened with CrowdStrike and Microsoft,” Furrier said.
The new landscape is gradually becoming more clear, according to Furrier. While theCUBE has always said this is a data problem, that’s now heightened.
“Data at scale, I feel like I’m at a cloud show at these security events. It’s the same stuff. End-to-end workloads, full observability, governance, risk management,” Furrier said. “It’s like a cloud show, Dave, but with risk management. It’s unbelievable. I think you’re going to see a lot more policies and specific things in place with things like the CrowdStrike, Microsoft debacle, because there’s now liability to disruption.”
VMware’s next steps to be explored
Mark your calendars for VMware Explore, which runs August 27 to 29. A particular area of focus will be VMware Inc.’s revamping of its partner network, according to Furrier.
“Maybe it’s been a little bit too late, a day late and dollar short, because the vibe is partners are not happy,” he said.
On the business side, the VMware Cloud Foundation is doing well, as is VMware Private AI, according to Furrier. There’s also been a massive surge back to VMware Tanzu Spring.
“They’re actually increasing their community. So, VMware just might get lucky … Hock Tan’s genius on this was to trim it down, but they have some integration pains,” Furrier said. “We’re going to cover that in depth. So, not sure what to expect yet, but we’ll be there in force.”
Broadcom Inc.’s strategy moving forward will be the thing to watch at VMware Explore, according to Vellante. That involves a number of factors.
“As Broadcom narrows down the customer base, simplifies the packages, charges more, invests in R&D, what’s the degree to which they can transition people out of the ELAs, maintain enough customers to actually go all-in?” he said. “You can’t tell from the ETR spending data, because it’s all account-based, and they’re narrowing down the number of accounts. So, the ETR data looks horrible for VMware, but it doesn’t capture the spend level. That’s going to be the key.”
Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were mentioned:
Michael DeCesare, president at Abnormal Security
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla
Paul Gillin, enterprise editor at SiliconANGLE Media
Soni Jiandani, CVP at AMD Networking Technology and Solutions Group
Steve Ballmer, former CEO and president of Microsoft
MrBeast, internet personality
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms
Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission
Jack Welch, executive chairman of The Jack Welch Management Institute
Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO and chairman of Apple Inc.
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon
Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet
Jeremy Siegel, economist
Martin Casado, partner at Andreessen Horowitz
Scott Wiener, United States senator
Andrew Ning, associate professor at Brigham Young University
Charlie Kawwas, president at Broadcom
Charlie Giancarlo, CEO of Pure Storage
Hock Tan, president and CEO of Broadcom
Matt Garman, CEO of AWS
Rob Hof, editor-in-chief at SiliconANGLE Media
George Gilbert, principal analyst at theCUBE Research
Benoit Dageville, co-founder and president of product at Snowflake
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