I'm publishing this post early due to an appointment I have tomorrow morning.
VMWare is announced to have laid off about 800 people. Among them are the 20 or so people who brought us Workstation, Fusion, Player, among other things. These products are core to several workflows for technical users, and are core in the development and testing of VMware's other products.
As of right now, it's unclear what will happen with the products. It is possible they'll be discontinued, or possible they'll be put into a maintenance mode, only ever to get minor updates and new driver packs as the technology industry continues to change rapidly.
VMware Fusion was instrumental in bringing the concept of virtualizing Windows/Linux as well as Mac OS X to the Mac, and is popular among Mac developers and advanced users as a way to avoid keeping multiple systems around, or using different tools (Windows LOB software, windows games, etc) on the go using MacBook hardware.
VMWare Workstation is essentially unparalleled in the desktop virtualization world. Parallels stopped existing for Windows, Hyper-V is very immature as of yet and does not properly support things like Solaris 10, BeOS/Haiku, among other things. It's a continuously improved product and the improvements year over year, if you were paying attention to the product, were impressive.
I'm perhaps personally a little soft on it. It occupies a warm spot in my heart from when I got one of my first really modern computers, an Intel-based iMac, and almost immediately after the product became available, I purchased VMWare Fusion for it. Essentially, while breaking no sweat at all, VMWare promised to run two or three virtual machines with at least as much capacity as my previous PC. I had a "homework system" which was set up and ready to go when I just needed Windows, and I started working with test systems. It was the next logical step forward from a long-standing Mac product: Connectix (later Microsoft) Virtual PC.
As a PowerPC Mac user, it was "possible" to use Virtual PC to run Windows or Linux, and a few other x86 operating systems, to gain access to applications you might otherwise have needed to buy a second computer for. This was especially important for laptop users, and as the practicality of entire computers on PCI expansion cards went away.
Today, it's probably more practical to just own two computers than it ever has been. Cloud services, subscription-based software that allows for installation on multiple computers, and fast and ubiquitous wireless Internet connections have made casual needs for a product like Virtual PC to run Office on a Mac unnecessary. For what Virtual PC used to cost, you can buy a whole computer, upgrade it to a professional edition of Windows, and use Remote Desktop to access it from a Mac or Linux system as well.
For the most part, desktop virtualization is now relegated to a few highly technical use cases. Despite that, VMWare Workstation and Fusion were profitable products, and they more than fully pay their way within the VMWare corporate structure.
For the rest of the part, Fusion offered a pretty great and relatively easy non-technical solution for "users" and administrators and developers alike to get other operating systems on Mac systems, and tools like Horizon allow an IT department to publish specific apps or entire virtual environments to employees' personal laptops in BYOD types of environments. This is a logical extension of the Citrix XenClient, which was a bare metal hypervisor for laptops and desktops, and was one of the first serious forays into the idea that you could run both a corporate system and a personal system on the same hardware, possibly at the same time.
The response I saw when I brought up the possible death of VMWare Workstation in a room where I chat pretty frequently was surprising and perhaps even a little bit distressing. Essentially, the suggestion was that VMWare represents an old guard way of thinking about things and that (this is simplified and paraphrased just a little bit) if you use VMWare Workstation, you are wrong and are useless as an IT professional.
It was surprising to hear this, the justification being that you can just use ESXi or Hyper-V instead, but VMWare Workstation has always struck me as more of a companion product to those. I never got to try this functionality, but VMWare Workstation gained a lot of functionality in the 2010s for managing ESXi servers, among other things, and in general, VMWare Workstation is years ahead of everything else in terms of running virtual machines on desktop computers. It's also one of the better places to run virtual machines of things like Mac OS X, Solaris 10, and a few other things that really don't work well on Hyper-V.
There are a lot of alternatives to Workstation and Fusion, including Hyper-V (both on servers, on client systems, and the bare metal hypervisor), ESXi, and VirtualBox. Each of these things is for different tasks and has different strengths and weaknesses, however. For example, ESXi requires special management applications on any computer you use to manage the VMs, and doesn't have nearly as many features in terms of integration, snapshotting, and so on. ESXi and Bare Metal Hyper-V also have management overhead of needing a different computer. Client Hyper-V is a little better, but it mostly lacks any kind of advanced functionality like a unified view, advanced management of the network interfaces, advanced snapshotting, and it doesn't run a whole lot of different operating systems.
The other weird thing about the thought that VMWare Workstation/Fusion now represent an old way of doing things is that it's easy to build or buy computers that have or accept a whole lot of RAM and have very powerful CPUs. There has never been a better time to run desktop virtualization. It's a pretty common need in IT fields as well as in development, in certain academic areas, as well as in hobbyist and enthusiast situations where people want to install test software or for people who want to test different operating systems.
Ultimately, we don't yet know what the future of these products is. We know that VMWare has shed a bunch of employees. It could be because VMWare no longer believes these are relevant products, or if it's a situation where EMC and VMWare are slimming down in preparation for either having certain components spun out, or to be bought by Dell. Even if it is the case that the product isn't long for this world, it's still the best product for this task and as far as I've seen, is well worth the money if you need the features. There's a free version of VMWare Workstation available with limited functionality. I haven't used it in a while, but I may go ahead and install it system.