It did — it was called vCloud Air and it was effectively abandoned at the time EMC decided to sell itself to Dell in 2015. I was there from Day 1, when vCloud Air had a couple of people, to the end of 2015 when there were more than a thousand people working on vCloud Air.

Building a competitive cloud service requires billions of dollars in capital spending. We were getting that capex from EMC. But to buy EMC, Michael Dell needed huge debt - tens of billions of dollars. He saw EMC and VMware’s cash reserves as an important part of the deal: he needed them.

Also, VMware is a cash-generating machine, and that factored into Dell’s plans to make money on the deal.

The net: EMC now had a total lack of interest in spending billions on cloud service capex. The Dell deal was announced in October. It was at this point that VMware looked to expand its relationship with Google and start one with AWS.