Things haven’t gone well for Broadcom since it acquired VMware, and much of what has happened has confirmed fears that Virtzilla customers expressed well before the deal closed.
Oh no! I guess.
Broadcom is out to juice a product for its value before throwing it in the bin. Broadcom knows exactly what it’s doing, and that is preying on customers and exploiting engineers.
I’m not even sure they’re going to bin it. Maybe shed the last-profitable customers to maximize profit from the large consumers. At least for a few years.
Call me cynical, but to me it’s about pushing consumers (SMB) to cloud providers instead of virtualizing on-prem with VMware. Broadcom can still sell VMware and support to larger vendors, or to SMB’s for a heftier profit margin.
I can only hope many SMB’s have support vendors who see the value in shifting to TrueNAS, Proxmox, etc (there are vendors who provide support contracts for those Open-source packages).
Even if they do, they get bonuses for short term stock gain, not long term stuff. If the going gets bad, they totally do bail. Some companies - khm Reddit khm - even bring in execs just to take a fall when that happens, only for the same guys who set the problem up to take back the reins after the fallout.
I just left one of the UK’s largest VMWare customers, in a team working directly on VSphere and ESXI products. The team was just starting to tool up for a new internal project to manage VMs within the company using some of the newer features in these tools. We had well over 1 million VMs across more than a dozen datacenters. The cost of running this is expected to go up by 30 times or more.
While it’s going to take some time, they’re now looking at migrating to a different solution. So Broadcom are going to get their extra pay for a while, but not forever.
Oh no! I guess.
Broadcom is out to juice a product for its value before throwing it in the bin. Broadcom knows exactly what it’s doing, and that is preying on customers and exploiting engineers.
I’m not even sure they’re going to bin it. Maybe shed the last-profitable customers to maximize profit from the large consumers. At least for a few years.
Call me cynical, but to me it’s about pushing consumers (SMB) to cloud providers instead of virtualizing on-prem with VMware. Broadcom can still sell VMware and support to larger vendors, or to SMB’s for a heftier profit margin.
I can only hope many SMB’s have support vendors who see the value in shifting to TrueNAS, Proxmox, etc (there are vendors who provide support contracts for those Open-source packages).
The problem with large customers is they can see value and if you charge too much it goes they can build their own.
Not by next quarter. By the time that happens, this set of execs will be already at the next company.
Often execs stick around longer than that.
Even if they do, they get bonuses for short term stock gain, not long term stuff. If the going gets bad, they totally do bail. Some companies - khm Reddit khm - even bring in execs just to take a fall when that happens, only for the same guys who set the problem up to take back the reins after the fallout.
They generally have a large part of their net worth in company stock and are getting options. Thus long term matters.
It’s supposed to work like that. You’re naive to think it actually does work like that for a majority of companies nowadays.
“By next quarter” would be Proxmox
I just left one of the UK’s largest VMWare customers, in a team working directly on VSphere and ESXI products. The team was just starting to tool up for a new internal project to manage VMs within the company using some of the newer features in these tools. We had well over 1 million VMs across more than a dozen datacenters. The cost of running this is expected to go up by 30 times or more.
While it’s going to take some time, they’re now looking at migrating to a different solution. So Broadcom are going to get their extra pay for a while, but not forever.