After 114 days of change, Broadcom CEO acknowledges VMware-related “unease”

But all of these moves have been with the goals of innovating faster

Fail.

meeting our customers’ needs more effectively,

Fail.

and making it easier to do business with us.

Fail.

If the goal is milking your customers for more money then it all makes sense. At least until they start migrating away from VMware and your new client stream completely dries up.

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Yes, the only thing that Broadcom gives a shit about here:

Broadcom expects VMware revenue to grow double-digits quarter over quarter for the rest of the fiscal year.

The ‘ol late-stage capitalism adage “growth above all else”

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- "Short-term growth above all else, then lay everyone off and find the next business to buy out and ruin"
  
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- Translation: We are gonna gouge the ever living fuck out of every single customer.
  
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I am so fuckdamn tired of having products taken away 'to meet customers needs more effectively'.

Companies that make shittastic public statements like this should be subject to legal punishment.

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- And illegal punishment!
  
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At least until they start migrating away from VMware and your new client stream completely dries up.

This is a feature. They take a product that you can't easily move off of, like VMware or Symantec. They jack up the prices. A few people leave, but some people struggle to leave and pay lots of money. Demand drops, they cut most of the staff and put the product on life support, and eventually they kill it. By that time they've bought another company to do the same.

They're basically just milking old cows to death.

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- Totally unrelated, but that's actually what we're doing with cows. Killing them of at age 3 bc they don't give enough milk anymore
  
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- Said it before, they're dumping low value customers for high value customers. This can be a legit strategy!
  
  But not in this case. As you said, they're going to milk the cow dead. We wouldn't touch VMware with a ten-foot frog. Leaning into Proxmox ATM, working great so far.
  
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A lot of people talk about Proxmox but I wouldn't be surprised if redhat open shift decided to throw its hat into the ring as an HP or Dell partner.

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- While open shift can somewhat accommodate VM workloads, it feels like an afterthought. Really the goal is to charge how your applications are run.
  
  However, VMware presides over staunchly "old fashioned" ships that think in terms of "machines". So ProxMox is a bit more similar.
  
  RedHat did have ovirt which would have been a closer platform, but they ditched that in favor of openstack, which was also VM centered but "cloudy", which also isn't the target model of on premise virtualization (openstack had other problems too), and now it's openshift, which is largely a "kubernetes is a buzz word, let's go, also as an afterthought some VM hosting to give some semblance of continuity for users we yanked through RHEV, openstack, and for now openshift"
  
  It might play a role, but ProxMox may be better situated to be like for like. Microsoft is of course pushing their azure stack for those wiling to get tied up into azure a bit. I suspect openshift will continue to mainly focus on cloud hosted VMs rather than retool they're go to market to better capture those abandoning VMware. After all, since the story is "reduce costs", that's not an appealing scenario to red hat/IBM, since it inherently puts an obvious upper bound on revenue and the customers will be those that demonstrated they are the most ready to migrate when unhappy.
  
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In his blog post, Tan defended the subscription-only licensing model, calling it "the industry standard."

“Industry standard” my ass.

If Adobe hadn’t started the trend by lusting after Blizzard’s subscription model and ultimately emulating it, we’d all be a lot better off.

Not to mention our wallets being eternally thankful.

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It is the industry standard now, it never had to be but they all got greedy and Adobe kickstarted the slide

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Free and open source software is the industry standard

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My job estimated our VMware cost will be 10 times more expensive. We’re moving to the cloud as soon as possible.

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A panicky move to the cloud might be extremely expensive too. Especially if you don't have cloud ready applications (old on prem apps, full fledged VMs, etc. )

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- It’s not panic. We already have direct connects to AWS and Azure. It’s something we’ve been working on for five years now.
  
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We sell hardware built for and bundled with VMware. Customers are returning it. This isn't a good look.

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Not sure why they’d think cloud will be cheaper. If anything, costs are way more unpredictable from the research I’ve done.

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- Generally that is true only if you don't know your workloads.
  
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Man I wish we could do this, but our customers won't agree to processing their data in the cloud. We're going to get milked so hard.

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Pure damage control lingo. Anyone in the game for a while knows exactly how Broadcom operates. Theyre not hanging around while they squeeze the juice out until it becomes another SAP or Oracle. If he thinks a subscription model isn’t going to cause a mass exodus, he is a fool.

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So I may be biased but what is vmwares USP? From my limited experience it was a slightly more polished GUI for creating VMs and the ability to run on older pre-virt hardware. Is the experience still objectively better than the alternatives?

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If you’re running a lab or a small shop any hypervisor can likely do the job. Anything above that VMware’s overall ecosystem is the most robust and well-supported.

At this point virtualization is a legacy technology. It’s not going to disappear tomorrow but its clock is ticking the same way the clock was ticking for mainframes thirty years ago. Plenty of mainframes still out there but nobody is implementing new. Same can be said for virtualization. It’s a limited market with significantly slowed growth over where it was a decade ago.

The move to a subscription model will let them squeeze every last dollar out of the technology while they still can.

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- Wait what
  
  virtualization is a legacy technology
  
  AWS, GCP, and Azure run on virtualization. Do you think all these cloud providers are providing everyone bare metal? This doesn’t include containerization which is a subset of virtualization. Your average shop might not run virtualization directly unless of course your team touches VirtualBox or Vagrant or qemu or (probably shouldn’t) HyperV.
  
  Either your understanding of virtualization is very lacking or you didn’t explain your point very well. I am really curious what you meant.
  
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- At this point virtualization is legacy technology.
  
  Man, I'd love to believe that - and please Lemmy, prove me wrong, but virtualization, especially commercial products like VMware have one huge advantage over things like kubernetes - it's effectively plug and play and has full support available.
  
  Boot off this esxi iso
  
  Deploy this VCSA OVA
  
  Have vCenter auto config VSAN
  
  Deploy fully ha/Drs managed VMs
  
  I would kill for a similar experience with kubes - something that I cannot for the life of me get to work in my homelab given the myriad of walkthrough in various states of accuracy.
  
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- Please forgive a wildly uninformed question: What is it that VMware does today that isn’t covered by Docker?
  
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This is the best summary I could come up with:

In a blog post Thursday, Tan noted that Broadcom spent 18 months evaluating and buying VMware.

But all of these moves have been with the goals of innovating faster, meeting our customers’ needs more effectively, and making it easier to do business with us.

Tan believes that the changes will ultimately "provide greater profitability and improved market opportunities" for channel partners.

Additionally, Broadcom killing VMware perpetual licensing has reportedly upended financials for numerous businesses.

In a March “User Group Town Hall,” attendees complained about “price rises of 500 and 600 percent,” The Register reported.

In his blog post, Tan defended the subscription-only licensing model, calling it "the industry standard."

The original article contains 499 words, the summary contains 109 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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