alt Hacker NewsI didn't realize how addicted some orgs were to VMWare until Broadcom bought them and I witnessed zero people migrate to alternatives. It's been one of the single biggest shocks to me in my career. Watching them get squeezed openly and ruthlessly and just accepting it. I've only ever seen Microsoft pull that off before.
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I guess that means that VMWare are very skilled in calculating exactly how much they can hike the price / squeeze. Same with oracle, and all the other vendors that play this game.
It kind of makes sense, if you're using VMWare, your choice is to pay a ridiculous but fixed/certain sum, or embark on a risky migration project that probably involves hiring a bunch of people, could take longer than expected, might fail, etc.
They tend to be large complex enterprises outside tech. They don’t have the people (from the cto/cio down) to execute a migration well. They tend to have a very poor to mixed history with other tech migrations, and the risk here would be even higher.
My workplace have had ibm support contracts from before Steve Jobs met Woz…
Some software companies sort of stumble into treating their customers as hostages while others make an art form of it. Computer Associates, which is part of Broadcom now, has been doing that for decades.
I'm not surprised that there's a lot of inertia.
VMware Workstation has historically been the most "it just works" option if one needed solid USB passthrough support. I've bought my own license for about 15 years because of that. Obviously I won't be doing that anymore because I refuse to subscribe instead of buying a permanent license.
I've been out of the infrastructure engineering space for a long time, but when that was still my career, vSphere was extremely reliable and easy to manage. When I've poked my head back in during pen tests since then, it's seemed like that was still the case.
Feels like Broadcom wants to use the Microsoft/Oracle/Cisco business model. They'll probably get away with it (at least for awhile) in the enterprise space, but they seem to have reached the same conclusion as me - Workstation and Fusion don't have enough exclusive aspects to be make the consumer market worth pursuing.