Broadcom reverses controversial plan in effort to cull VMware migrations

Too late Broadcom. You dun fucked up.

Milking customers only works if they can't go anywhere else. Too bad dozens of different virtual machine hypervisors exist. Docker is also a thing (I know it's not a VM but it more or less serves the same purpose).

This is the corporate equivalent of "Oops we fucked up and customers noticed."

I doubt it will stem the flow after already ditching partners like AWS. As an ICT consultant with two decades of experience with VMware, I'm not recommending this platform any longer and this announcement won't change that. I doubt that I'm an outlier in this view, time will tell.

It's not a reversal, it's a minor adjustment to keep companies from leaving, so they can jack the prices again next year.

They see the writing - Enterprises are adjusting by moving to solutions like Proxmox (or vendors who provide the full package support), which will drive a need for the Linux KVM skillset. This will in turn expand that skillset, enabling more SMBs to run KVM.

Note that KVM is more performant than VMware, and that VMware has already switched VMware Workstation to KVM. Yep, their own desktop app is no longer their own code, but a shell on KVM.

Die in a fire CEO. VMware was the go-to since about 2006. It will now get supplanted by versions of KVM.

IT departments noticed there are more viable options than VMWare. Thanks Broadcom!

The most annoying thing isn’t even the price hikes or the direct sales - it’s the ambiguity they’ve introduced into things. “Hey we need pricing for xyz”. “Ya, we’re not sure if we’re going to quote that”. Like wtf? We’re a middleman who has deployed VMware on our systems for decades mostly because that’s what end users want - but it doesn’t matter to us, we can deploy in other options easily enough.

But like - It’s like quote it or take the account - but the customer has a project and you won’t make up your mind. Seriously, we have quotes stuck in pergatory for over 6 months, yet they won’t call the end user and sell direct. Customers literally can’t buy VMware even if they are ok with a 1000x cost - and they wonder why people are moving on.

Budgeting season is sept-Dec. I think everyone I know is kicking off a migration project for 2025 to another platform - mostly because they can’t get a quote/licenses. VMware is screwed and it’s only just begun.

This change doesn't even have anything to do with customers as far as I can tell? Sounds like they pissed off their resellers by cutting them out of deals with their biggest accounts, and are regretting burning all those bridges.

Oh they're selling VMware? Because them buying it was the controversial part that spurred people to migrate. Everything else was expected.

We got the fuck out as soon as the writing was on the wall. Wait, you want me to pay how much for VMware with new features other than using all my cores?

Well let's look at my options, proxmox is 2.5% of my VMware price? Jesus....

But not before causing 2+ years of tedious previously-unnecessary migration work. Thanks a lot assholes.

It was a dumb move. They had a niche market cornered, (serious) enterprises with on-prem infrastructure. Sure, it was the standard back in the late 2000's to host virtualization on-prem but since then, the only people who have not outsourced infrastructure hosting to cloud providers, have reasons not to, including financial reasons. The cloud is not cheaper than self-hosting, serverless applications can be more expensive, storage and bandwidth is more limited, and performance is worse. Good example of this is openai vs ollama on-prem. Ollama is 10,000x cheaper, even when you include initial buy-in.

Let VMware fail. At this point they are worth more as a lesson to the industry, turn on your users and we will turn on you.

I mean, i knew already that Broadcom is bad at software.

Dell, what the fuck did you done.