As firms abandon VMware, Broadcom is laughing all the way to the bank
As firms abandon VMware, Broadcom is laughing all the way to the bank
Ingram Micro the latest to ditch VMware, but VMware’s still making money.
Well, there are reasonable alternatives these days and if more companies donated to Proxmox/bought their services there would be a better replacement sooner.
But with Proxmox Datacenter Manager it's going in the right direction.
2I switched to Proxmox over the summer. My homelab has been rather neglected since then, but I have other things on my mind at the moment. Anyway, it seems robust from a few weeks of kicking it around and I'm excited about it.
1I switched both my homeland and my company servers to it and couldn't be happier.
1
Can someone translate this into English?
19Sure!
Here's more relatable analogy. Microsoft Office costs about $30/month per user for companies. For our example imagine Google Workspace doesn't exist. So the "default" office software of MS Office that nearly everyone uses is not cheap, but not expensive. Further, you don't buy MS Office from Microsoft directly, but through a partner that gives you other discounts and support. Now imagine that overnight Microsoft decides they're desolving their partner network and you have to buy MS Office directly from Microsoft and also starting tomorrow that MS Office now costs ten times as much at $300/month per user. Would everyone stop using MS Office? Eventually, but you've got business you need to do today. Your company can't even send email without Outlook, which is part of MS Office. So your company is BLEEDING money just paying for MS Office, and there's no good alternative. So you pay it for now. You try desperately to come up with a plan to use something else, but for now you're paying through the nose. Companies will take years to identify another product that replaces everything in the company that MS Office is used for and training the entire company to use and support this new product.
Replace the name Microsoft with Broadcom. Replace the name MS Office with VMware. This is what is happening and Broadcom is laughing all the way to the bank.
92Except companies are already jumping ship to other solutions. One very large company is moving thousands of VMs to an implementation of KVM, virtually eliminating the insane VM licensing.
Broadcom has all but admitted their own solution is inferior, by converting their workstation virtualization to KVM!
To Broadcom's credit, the writing was on the wall that versions of KVM would be eating their market over the next 10 years (for example, Proxmox), so they're getting all they can now before their corner on the market weakens.
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A big part of Broadcom's current business model seems to be:
- Buy company that makes an important product/service used by many big companies.
- Squeeze the acquired company for every last drop of short term profit; increasing prices, abandoning products, etc.
- Watch large companies jump ship to other solutions
- Repeat
27Products go to Broadcom to die.
13A good reason to try to avoid being deeply dependent on a product that a single company controls that's hard to transition away from. Even if you're happy with that company, someone else might manage to get control of them.
11
Seems perfectly plain to me.
Broadcom owns VMware, which is sold through wholesale distributors, Ingram being among the biggest distributors is stopping distribution of VMware, basically because they claim to not make enough money on it. To which Broadcom says never mind, you're not a very good distributor of our product anyway. And they prefer smaller more focused distributors.And then the piece goes on about how Broadcom makes more money on VMware than before it was owned by Broadcom, and how Broadcom is now a trillion dollar company, because they expect to make a shitload on AI by 2027.
5To be honest, Ingram's VMWare team was hot garbage, unresponsive and unhelpful for the last 2 years. Good riddance. We were looking at switching our VMware disty anyway
2
One company is charging less for a similar product. The numbers are big, so there are articles about it.
3
Broadcom can sell to 5% of its customers and still make 50%. They can cut all sales and support staff to make it work. They don’t need a reseller.
17I didn’t know that Broadcom’s CEO was named Hawk Tuah.
6Sounds like someone hocking a loogie.
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