If you do keep an eye on what is going on in the EUC on Twitter, you probably noticed this week quite a conversation regarding a webinar that someone at Citrix decided to host. It seems that some ‘Roberto Vich’ guy thought it was a good idea to have a webinar called “A value-add and business discussion on why Citrix wins over Nerdio for WVD workloads”, open to the public and then blast that to all customers in a pure genius marketing effort. If you do not believe in what I am saying, here you have the original email:
Before I go ahead and explain my view about the whole mess created by Citrix here (yes, this is a mess – no other way around it) I do need to mention a couple things:
- I do not even know who decided this was a good idea but that said, this is an Apples to Oranges comparison. No matter what I think about Citrix as a company, the reality is their product in many ways is quite good. More than that, it is a whole stack of products and technologies that go way beyond delivering desktops on-prem or in the cloud. Of course, to properly educate your partners, it is important that you discuss certain things but that said, what sort of partners do you have that do not understand the differences between your own stack and hotcakes like WVD and/or Nerdio? Also the webinar was public so really not directed at partners but at customers too.
- One more time, if you do not know me or have not heard this enough, I am always for the right solution to the job/customer. For reference, last year I spent probably 80% of my time doing Citrix Cloud deployments for customers and do believe the product makes sense in many cases. But far from being all cases as Citrix wants to make you believe.
Now back to the mess at stake, why is this a mess? First it shows, all based on my own opinion, that Citrix is a mess internally as of today. What is upper management doing to let something like this out? Is there anyone looking at this type of activity internally and acting/filtering these before it goes into the wild? Only two possibilities here: yes someone is doing it (and in this case doing a very poor job at it) or is doing nothing. Both cases it is clear these people are not needed and should be let go immediately before further damage is done.
Secondly, it shows that in some ways the company is desperate, feeling that anyone or anything is a threat, regardless how big or small the company is (Nerdio is tiny by comparison). But more than that, it shows a complete lack of understanding about the industry and how Citrix’ own products tackle the industry needs and which companies are indeed the real competitors. Overall it is just plain terrible, from C-level down the chain.
It is time for a big shake up at Citrix, seriously. Very few good people remaining and given what we keep seeing (do not think this was an isolated event – screw ups like this are now a common occurrence at Citrix and as they keep happening it seems no one really cares about these or cannot even understand what is happening really) unless they take action and quickly, the future will not be as bright as they are painting it.
And please, stock prices do not tell you the real story. Most investors still think Citrix is a company based in Florida that sells oranges or something related to the citrus ecosystem.
I am starting to think many employees think that too…
CR