They know customers will pay, but mostly they can lock in long term contracts on favorable terms.
Hock is scarily good at his job, depending on how you define his job.
Surely this is self defeating? Everyone seeing these insane price increases will scare off any potential new customers and drive away the customers they do have. Sure it might increase revenue in the short term but ultimately it’ll kill the product. Or is that the point? Make as much money as they can with as little effort as possible and then let it die?
It is the point, this is exactly what Broadcom does.
Yup, this is on form for them. This isn’t the first product they’ve done it to and surely won’t be the last.
The moment the news broke we started migration planning, a short while later their new pricing came through and immediately justified the project spend. Tens of thousands of VMs migrated, a ton of labour, and even some hardware refreshes thrown in - and still cheaper than renewing, by a looong shot.
Shame, I liked VMware.
What platform your company (I assume) migrated to?
Yay capitalism
Short term is all that matters. Did the line go up this quarter? Then they’re good.
Killing the product is the future CEOs problem.
HyperV looking like a good option for a lot of customers now. They are in the Microsoft noose anyway… so now they can go all in.
Thankfully Microsoft is a thrustworthy partner with the users best interests in mind. /s
At home Proxmox works reall well. When our VMWare licenses expire we’ll certainly evaluate that as option.
I’d start now… these transitions usually take a bit. And Broadcom will only get more predatory. Staying with VMware is not a realistic option… especially if you rely on a support partner. With these mega corps only the other mega corps will get proper support… the rest can crawl in a hole and die
So now is the time to figure out what replacement fits best, check your team for capability gaps and send your VMware people to courses to get intimate with the replacement.
This 1000% because you know for fuck sure that some dev in the corner of a building that’s going to be the last holdout.
Start planning now with an implementation plan to complete a few months before the contract is set to expire. Plans like these often hit bumps and delays.
Once you’re down to the last 5%, tell them “Join or Die”.
Any one want to guess who will really end up paying for the price hike?
It’s not AT&T.