Lol @ a supermarket chain calling another company abusive.
Anyway, are these the corporate customers Broadcom decided to focus on to the detriment of the average user?
We were a VMware shop, albeit much smaller deployments. When a vendor increases prices up to 1000% (https://www.ciodive.com/news/att-broadcom-vmware-price-hikes-court-battle/728603/), you can bet that price is being passed along to consumers. VMware was by far the most popular virtualization platform prior to the acquisition, so it’d be a safe bet that you were affected by this from more than one company you deal with.
I don’t understand your message. Are you implying I’m underestimating the effects of Broadcom’s policies? How did you get that impression? I use VMware at work myself.
@Valuy, beyond the ‘abusive conduct’ accusation, I’m thinking about the sheer cost for Tesco to rip out 40,000 servers and re-platform. It’s not just the new hardware/software, but the operational overhead, retraining staff, and potential service disruptions. This kind of move makes the initial cost of choosing open-source, even with its own challenges, look very appealing in the long run for critical infrastructure. It underscores the value of flexibility. We’ve gathered some insights on the TCO (total cost of ownership) comparisons between proprietary and open-source stacks for customer acquisition, which might be interesting to you at https://cxgo.ai/l/63hknMG.
is this why i cant get any hardware? i thought it was the Iran ‘war’ and AI… more to hate on broadcom.
Someone must have told them about proxmox lol.
We were a VMware shop until the buyout. We’ve moved almost all our virtualization to Nutanix. Fuck Broadcom.
I have trouble feeling sympathy for any company which didn’t greet the Broadcom buyout of VMWare with a firm plan to migrate. Expecting anything other than “abusive conduct” out of Broadcom is like expecting to jump in the ocean and not get wet.
What took them so long? Even before the Broadcom purchase, VMWare was enshittifying their product. They failed to transition from technology leader to commodity product.
But other technologies have since come along to make VMs either a lot less important or baked in. For me too it was a sudden transition going from VM farms to docker/k8s, web apps, cloud services, etc. on the other hand that was years ago
They failed to transition from technology leader to commodity product.
Well, Broadcom clearly saw that VMware was on the trajectory to be supplanted by either cloud aligned virtualization solutions or built in operating system virtualization. They failed to really carve out another niche because even in the most dedicated VMware shop, all the advances happened in operating systems by other vendors.
So Broadcom decided explicitly to gouge the hell out of customers too afraid to migrate losing any chance at new customers (which they probably weren’t going to get any way) and scaring away current customers (I recall some report they felt they could alienate 90% of their customers and still be happy with how hard they were gouging the remaining 10%).
In short, going exactly according to plan.
Literally the Hock Tan playbook. Buy a foundational technology and jack the price way up assuming the whales will keep paying while mid and small customers fall away. Did it with Symantec, started to do it with Bitnami but backed off a bit due to massive backlash.
They bank on the asspain of switching tech tooling being greater than the financial pain of the price gouging. But hey, that’s capitalism for ya.
Yeah I mean that happens when you extort your customers
Does anyone else think that’s a lot of servers for a grocery store?
I understand the need for SLAs but I’m always annoyed to see businesses never consider just using that vendor money to pay for a quality IT team and using something open source like Proxmox or Apache Cloud.
Especially when its something really basic like VMs and not actual cloud infrastructure.
In this case, that are pissed because they already spent the money. Further I’m sure they started the VMware path likely over 15 years ago, and frankly the alternatives weren’t great back then and VMware wasn’t as crazy unreasonable.
One could think it’s not great that they are going Microsoft for virtualization after being bitten, but I’m positive their infrastructure is Windows based and so for them, it makes sense. I can’t imagine that being the desired choice personally, but here we are.
Nobody wants responsibility. If you go with a vendor it’s their fault when they fuck up. If it’s internal, someone in the company has to take the blame.
No one is ever fired for buying IBM or Microsoft.
You get fired by saving the company million s with open source alternatives until the day there’s an issue and they can’t blame IBM or Microsoft.
You can practically feel the enshittification drip through your screen when you attempt to use VMWare Workstation for free (which they technically allow you to do).
They make you enter address and identification data when you try to download it. However, they don’t actually check whether any of that data is sound, so you can state your location is 42069 Jackoff Ville on the far side of the moon. Ask me how I know.
