Raghu Raghuram: Practitioner usage pattern shifts create unshakeable tech lock-in
Raghu Raghuram · From the Dot-Com Crash to the AI Era: How Builders Survive Waves of Disruption · Aug 6, 2025 · at 2:33
Former VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram explains how changing practitioner habits and usage patterns creates deep vendor lock-in that makes software disruptions nearly impossible to remove.
0:00 / 0:12exact quote · 12.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Once you start to change the usage patterns and the behaviors, right, of the practitioners, then you get locked in and the disruption is almost impossible to remove, right?”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Raghu Raghuram
Raghuram: No Major Tech Company Was Built From Docker or Kubernetes
“Now, the interesting thing is the industry, nobody made money on either Docker or Kubernetes. I mean, there were some startups, right? But really, there was no big company that was created out of that.”
Raghuram: Selling to new enterprise user personas requires fenced-off teams
“There are some classes of innovation where you can get by what I would say is close adjacencies, where the If you're building a product that's closely adjacent to your original product. You can take it from zero to one through the existing Salesforce. Yeah. Ri…”
Raghuram: Non-Founder CEOs Get Less Time to Transform Companies Than Founders
“Founders will get much more time. The market gives them more time. The board gives them more time. The employees give them more time. Non-founders for various reasons, and I don't know if you agree, you don't get the same amount of time.”
Raghuram: AI bottlenecks have shifted from models to physical infrastructure
“What we have seen over the last three years is the steady increase of the capabilities of the models. Where the model is no longer the bottleneck. And in fact, using AI, these models are getting better faster and faster and faster. Now the bottleneck is all wh…”
Raghuram: VMware Did Not Know How to Market to Software Developers
“The cloud, I mean, initially Amazon AWS did not change The abstraction of a virtual machine but everything else, the business model changed, and the most important change that AWS brought about was it made infrastructure available to developers without IT. Tha…”
Raghuram: VMware vSAN failed with storage buyers until sold to compute buyers
“In fact, we had two iterations on vSAN, right? Initially, we said, hey, let's go after the storage buyer. That did not work as well. And then we said, look, we're going to go expand the compute buyer's purview. Right? Then it started working. So the go-to-mark…”