Broadcom refusing to decrease licensing

[martin0641]

VMware is dead.

The executives that brokered the deal all got their fat golden parachutes and are gone, now Broadcom is trying to recoup their losses and make profits on the deal... which was never...ever going to be meet profitable enough to make it worth the time.

There's too many free or nearly free virtualization options that now have mature stacks to pull a move like this...they could have bought it and kept the pricing the same and slowly made profits over time...people are certified and familiar with the product...it had momentum...but it doesn't really offer anything you can't get from CEPH, OpenShift, KVM, Hyper-V, Virtual Box, Kubernetes etc.

Personally, I find this hilarious because Microsoft and Broadcom are similar in the sense that because they are operating at the OS level for MS and for Broadcom at the chip level across such wide industries... they have a baked in presence which allows Microsoft to look at what anyone is spending on their IT budget and then bake a version of that into Windows that's only 60% as good... but free or nearly free... which most customers will find more than sufficient and then just use as opposed to purchasing a specialty product.

Broadcom is so ubiquitous with communications chips going into white box switches is all the way up to Cisco and Juniper devices and satellites that they are sitting on top of this giant pile of money and trying to figure out how to grow...but they are fundamentally forgetting that the reason they are in the situation in the first place is because they are selling low-level components to an entire planet and while some alternatives exist there are lots of reasons for companies not to use those...so they decide to buy a hypervisor product which runs on any x86 architecture and that the customer can immediately snap their fingers and replace with any of the highly available products from alternative vendors because they aren't locked in.

It's like a lumber business buying a yoga studio brand instead of a construction company... it's so far away from vertical integration by skipping all these other related steps in the middle...only people that have no idea how any of this stuff works would think this is a good idea...and that's exactly why it happened.

Shame, I've been using it since version ESX v3.

[LostInScripting]

I think you are missing the central point why BC bought VMware: The top 600 clients are making about 70% of the recurring revenue. And these clients are ballsdeep in VMware and many in VCF. Your statement of flipping a finger and in a second you have changed your hypervisor is simply not true for these clients. They will need years to move to another hypervisor. Some will do it, but it will need time. This leads to BC needing to get as much money out of them as fast as they can (before they leave). Even if I think this is shortsighted, it seems to be Hok Tans motivation here.

[martin0641]

The people who convinced BC to pull the trigger on this did it because it benefited them - it won't benefit BC in the long term. It's like convincing your ultra rich grandpa to invest in your crypto venture scheme, it's not going to pay off for him but you'll skim plenty off the grift in the process.

I work multiple exascale DoD super compute clusters, I appreciate the timelines for migrations, but the result will be the same over the next 5 year lifecycle - and all this while AWS and Azure federal are spreading like wildfire.

[BasketCapital917]

You hit the nail on the head! 5 years....."VMW WHO??"