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).
Really, this is just a wakeup call for everyone that was putting of going cloud native on apps. The potential costs of staying in VMWare are now higher than migrating, plus now there’s the added incentive of getting rid of ancient technical debt. Overall, it’s a good thing from a security and long-term cost standpoint for most of these businesses.
There are alternate on-prem solutions that are now good enough to compete with vmware, for a majority of the people impacted by vmwares changes. I think the cloud ship has sailed and the stragglers have reasons for not moving to the cloud, and in many cases companies nove back from the cloud once they realize just how expensive it actually is.
I think one of the biggest drivers for businesses to move to the cloud is they do not want to invest in talent, the talent leaves and it’s hard to find people who want to run in house infra for what is being offered. That talent would move on to become SRE’s for hosting providers, MSP’s, ISP’s, and so on. The only option the smaller companies have would be to buy into the cloud and hire what is essentially an administrator and not a team of architects, engineers, and admins.
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.
