I was running about 1000 machines on VMware in my previous career. It was always a love/hate relationship with them. We were able to achieve a lot of our goals using VMware and it was hard not to be ecstatic about the results. At the same time, they were always a nightmare to deal with, the software was buggy and support wasn't great.
I always dreaded renewal time because it was normal for them to use it as an opportunity to extort us. Microsoft was a breeze in comparison. It's funny because Microsoft always had such a horrible reputation. I don't know if I was just so abused by VMware or what, but Microsoft was just easy. We had an annual true-up date and we always knew where we stood with them. We reported our numbers and that was it. No surprises ever and there was never an issue if we didn't report any growth. VMware was always pulling some kind of shit and was absolutely determined to push us over budget every time.
Doing things that way (virtualization rather than containerization) fell out of vogue specifically because of how bad vmware was to work with. CPU quotas were probably what pushed serious people away from the product instead of machine licenses. I was early in my career but working with vmware products was the bane of our existence because if we wanted to make any sort of configuration change or spin up a test machine or really do anything at all it had to run through accounting which was just an instant non starter. we all started fiddling with alternatives and docker swiftly became reliable at least for spinning up a new web server or testing the latest and greatest whatever. vmware did this to themselves.
The bigger issue is, if you're refusing to honour a contract as a vendor, not only do you risk a lawsuit like this one. But more importantly, who is ever going to sign up for another contract with you? You just proved it isn't worth the paper it's written on.
Unwritten terms like "valid until I decide to tear it up haha lol" are not generally appreciated by companies that depend on your stuff for their business. Of course you can extort your existing customers until they manage to move away but basically in the longer term you're suiciding your entire business.
I had to tell CurrentCo that I cannot reinstall their vSphere deployment at a client site because they bought a perpetual license, didn’t migrate it to Broadcom before they cut it off, and now we cannot simply go get the latest patch or appliance for that version number without inviting an audit and a sueball from Broadcom.
At least VMware isn't user-facing and it can be removed without riots. Imagine trying to tell someone they don't need Excel. I try to maintain at least plausible flexibility to go tell vendors to shove it, but if you have some enthusiastic fans of Microsoft Teams (they exist, who knew?)... Teams is one of those things that is inescapably tied to an incredibly deep well of platform lock-in.
Ops person here, VMware is so embedded at these companies that switching away would be like Google saying, no more gRPC, everything is now SOAP. The amount of impacts is just too mind boggling to even consider.
2 companies ago was heavily invested in VMware. It impacted monitoring, backups, deployments, networking, cloud migration and more. I can only shudder at level of effort they might be going through to get off VMware.
Because of that, they probably won’t for years even as Broadcom screws them over.
Switching away today is too mind boggling to consider, but switching is purely a technical problem. We can put a price on the costs, and the time. VMWare was founded in 1998 - that means 27 year ago nobody was using it, and in turn we can say took you less than 27 years to get dependent on and - surely you can switch to something else in 27 years. More likely you can switch in 2 years - that is about what it took one company I know of.
... Google did say "No more Oracle EBS" and switched entirely to SAP. It took multiple years, and it was not a small effort, but there was the will, and a way was found.
As someone who only knows Broadcom's silicon business: there, they're just used to people having no other choice, with their quasi monopoly in some fields. Are they (mistakenly) transferring that attitude to VMware?
Our 5 year ELA for vmware went from 1.5M USD to 12M USD. Higher ed.
Our Hyper-V environment is coming online this month. It was already included with our ELA with Microsoft so we were able to splash out a bit for some higher tier support.
Mistakenly? No, Broadcom was very up-front about their plans to offload small customers and massively upcharge large customers pretty much the same week the purchase was announced. It's stupid, and Broadcom are certainly assholes, but they did give a LOT of advance warning.
Mostly they seem committed to drop smaller customers and pursue very lucrative deals with large companies only. But to do that they should be valuing those relationships with the big customers, and they clearly aren't doing that either.
that doesn’t seem to be an issue in this case, since it’s exactly what everyone expects Broadcom to do in any given situation. their victims/customers are people stuck on the platform from before Broadcom bought it.
There seems to be a "squeeze" phase in several of the software's life. When the organization goes from engineering oriented into sales oriented. Mostly true for those acquired by investors, wanting more money on spending no more. EBITDA and other related matters becoming paramount having no decade long perspectives, not even half in some instances. No long term there. Of course, you have to find the gold mines, those with locked in users.
I have never understood how Oracle remains a big company. Seems to me they have this type of reputation and just nobody will ever willingly buy anything from them ever
My beef with K8s (and to be clear, it’s the leanest cut of beef from the deli - so not much substance to it) is that unless you pay someone else to manage the Control Plane for you, you’re not only going to need to upskill your workers on K8s itself but also administering the components of the Control Plane, like HA, etcd, storage, network plane, etc.
Compared to standing up literally any Linux distro and KVM, K8s remains an overly complex PITA to get off the ground and integrated into an org on the cheap/free. In that area, it handily loses to even Microsoft Hyper-V in the “just get us going” category of business adoption/velocity.
I’d really, really like to see K8s more streamlined for initial deployment than it is. It’s getting better, but I generally still have to grudgingly recommend a premium, managed control plane for any serious deployment.
The state of software companies is pretty terrible. I have been on the acquisition side as well as the development / end-user side and it’s mind-boggling knowing the exorbitant costs with bare minimum value delivered, yet companies just keep paying whatever they’re told it costs, until it’s comically astronomical and the customers have to tell them to get bent. Yet still, software vendors keep changing their licensing structure until it meets that comically astronomical figure and pushing customers away.
Enterprise software licensing, support contracts, and technical account managers (TAMs) often run into hundreds of thousands or millions annually per organization. Yet, in practice, support tickets go unresolved or ignored, even for large clients.
The software quality of our most expensive products is extremely poor and unreliable, almost across the board. Many products suffer from bugs, outdated features, or incompatibility issues that disrupt operations. In development roles, this means wasted time on workarounds, custom patches, or integrations that shouldn't be necessary. For a non-small organization, this scales up to significant productivity losses and hidden costs in overhead.
These companies actively alienate us, the customer, through their business practices. Changes like aggressive licensing shifts (e.g., moving from per-core to per-employee models) force reevaluations and migrations and eroding trust (i.e. Oracle with Java, VMWare fiasco). This isn't isolated—it's a pattern where short-term revenue grabs risk long-term relationships, yet companies seem unfazed.
This jacks the entire ecosystem up. These practices stifle innovation by locking customers into suboptimal tools, increase overall IT spend industry-wide, and contribute to employee burnout in dev and ops teams.
It seems like it’s a race to the bottom. The strategy is to create an ecosystem with high switching costs and vendor lock-in. It just doesn’t seem sustainable, yet- it keeps truckin’ along.
Charlie Munger once said something to the effect of "show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes".
There is very little incentive to produce high-quality software, to not alienate your customers, and to support the thing you already sold. Those things cost money. Money paid for those things is money not paid to shareholders, and that's the ultimate incentive in our system.
They've got you by the balls, and secretly, your CEO thinks their CEO is a genius for thinking up and implementing that business model. Pay up.
> There is very little incentive to produce high-quality software, to not alienate your customers, and to support the thing you already sold.
I think some of what I'm trying to portray is that this should be the incentive. Either do it or you don't have a customer. Yet, the customers don't hold this standard.
As an individual consumer, if I don't get what I pay for, I return it or can even submit a charge-back. Is it not irresponsible of business management to not do the same?
It seems like these problems are related to software and a certain size of corporation that is selling it. VMWare isn't hoping to make a few $million, they want/need to make a few $billion. And it is absolutely a race to the bottom when you can get Proxmox for free. Nevermind Harvester and some of the other projects out there are are doing kinds of similar things.
I was a beta tester for VMWare way back when. It was one of the first pieces of software I bought out of college. It was like manna from heaven, I could commit to Linux and have a backdoor for Windows and I needed it, and I did from time to time. I also did security testing over the years and once you've joined a machine to a Windows domain, it never can be made the same again. Vmware enabled that business without a spare laptop or spending tons of time rebuilding it. I've maintained the license since then, 25ish years. Bought it for the Mac too. I can't think of a worse transition than the one they're doing.
Software, done right, is both extremely hard and expensive. Hardware was cheapened by China/Asia but it is not happening for software (theirs generally sucks and they lack many fundamentals). Europe completely lost the race.
The current breed of managers in the US have decided to fire developers, abuse customers (you have nowhere to go) and burn all the money on AI (they believe it’ll solve all their problems).
Morale will remain low until an alternative spawns. Kinda with electric cars. Europeans, Japanese and Koreans are now forced to up their game and lower their prices.
You're just saying things you want to be true, "Asian software" doesn't suck and Europe didn't lose.
Just because "all" software companies have American entities doesn't mean you "won", that's just what happens when a jurisdiction let's companies do anything even if it's detrimental to society as a whole.
Agreed. My org can take some of the blame but with our big vendors:
10s of millions on Adobe - admin side craps out all the time, terrible outsourced support (easy to escalate past them but still annoying that we sometimes have to start there)
10s of millions on Microsoft - Laissez-faire attitude about when they will update stuff during renewals and true-ups. Not specific date. Little help.
Broadcom - PE play (as we know from Broadcom) to squeeze every penny out. Have been through several account managers now. They won't sell through VARs anymore, only direct, and to get anything beyond VCF you have to be on a very special list that supposedly the CEO personally approves (which is beyond mind-boggling).
Starting to see some post production software be licensed based on having limited amount of contiguous time zones which is also crazy for a global company
Note: Media and healthcare industries may be SOL because there are lots of content and cybersec 'requirements' for having private clouds. Curious what others in those industries are doing
A lot of it is the cost of doing business. We'll see how it goes when MS moves to the consumption model they're proposing.
My pet peeve is core-based licensing for products such as database engines. For that matter, any kind of capacity licensing tied to some variant of Moore’s law inevitably results in the vendor holding their product’s face under water as the tide rises around them.
As a random example, SQL Server Standard Edition is limited to a “very generous” maximum of four sockets, 24 cores, or 128 GB of memory.
That’s just slightly bigger then a laptop these days!
The problem here is that Microsoft kept their license limits as constants relative to a reality that moved exponentially. They would have to have applied “inflation”, but they just saw their sales figures go up and up… and nobody will rock that boat!
Inevitably they’ll keep choking their product until it turns purple and dies. It’s a force of nature, there is nothing anybody can do do counter this naked corporate greed that is enabled by accidental mis-pricing. This can never be corrected, except by letting products die and be replaced wholesale in the market.
I know someone (I'm not going to say who - too many sue-happy people are accused here) who was using VMWare at work, and they decided to switch to virtualbox because they trusted Oracle more than Broadcom. Oracle has long has a reputation of being licensing jerks, but they are still trusted more than Boardcom.
Broadcom is headquartered in Palo Alto, and their physical product lines are mostly manufactured outside China from what I can tell (Broadcom itself is fabless). Are you sure you don’t have them confused with another company?
This is the ghost of Charlie Wang haunting the software industry. Computer Associates was notorious for this kind of licensing shenanigans. Guess where Computer Associates is now? A new generation of IT departments are discovering the Long Island wiseguy approach to licensing.
We ran 100% of our workloads on VMWare this time last year. We'll be at 0% this time next year. We were heading that direction over the long term anyway, but the Broadcom shenanigans made us double down on that effort. They may actually be more unpleasant to deal with than Oracle, which is something I would have thought to be impossible.
In a past life in the mid/late 2000s, I did 10GbE NIC drivers for a small IHV. VMWare was by far the most awful vendor to deal with. They had mandatory certification testing which was required to distribute the driver. Their tests were so much worse than MS WHQL. There was invariably something broken in their tests that we had to work around. Each time this happened, we had to go through their support (And pay for the privilege) to tell them their tests were broken and to give them patches to fix it. This would happen pretty much every driver release, and we would end up dealing with a different person each time.
My favorite thing about leaving that job was never having to deal with VMWare ever again.
> Many mid-market and regional operators view the new [subscription] structure as untenable and are actively exploring alternatives.. Nutanix emerged early as the leading competitive alternative to VMware.. over 2,700 new customers.. driven by organizations fleeing VMware's new pricing model.. [including] more than 50 Global 2000 companies, representing major enterprises willing to undertake complex, multi-year infrastructure overhauls.. With VMware serving approximately 200,000 customers globally, Nutanix sees most of the migration opportunity still ahead.
Readit News
I always dreaded renewal time because it was normal for them to use it as an opportunity to extort us. Microsoft was a breeze in comparison. It's funny because Microsoft always had such a horrible reputation. I don't know if I was just so abused by VMware or what, but Microsoft was just easy. We had an annual true-up date and we always knew where we stood with them. We reported our numbers and that was it. No surprises ever and there was never an issue if we didn't report any growth. VMware was always pulling some kind of shit and was absolutely determined to push us over budget every time.
VMware on the other hand is dying because doing things that way hasn't been the state of the art for a long time.
Dead Comment
Unwritten terms like "valid until I decide to tear it up haha lol" are not generally appreciated by companies that depend on your stuff for their business. Of course you can extort your existing customers until they manage to move away but basically in the longer term you're suiciding your entire business.
I had to tell CurrentCo that I cannot reinstall their vSphere deployment at a client site because they bought a perpetual license, didn’t migrate it to Broadcom before they cut it off, and now we cannot simply go get the latest patch or appliance for that version number without inviting an audit and a sueball from Broadcom.
“Good thing Microsoft would never do that to us.”
Ha. Hahaha.
2 companies ago was heavily invested in VMware. It impacted monitoring, backups, deployments, networking, cloud migration and more. I can only shudder at level of effort they might be going through to get off VMware.
Because of that, they probably won’t for years even as Broadcom screws them over.
VMWare may have hiked the prices and might be an important dependency but at a certain point it is cheaper to sue and/or switch from them.
Seems that they have gone way past this point
Our 5 year ELA for vmware went from 1.5M USD to 12M USD. Higher ed.
Our Hyper-V environment is coming online this month. It was already included with our ELA with Microsoft so we were able to splash out a bit for some higher tier support.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpE_xMRiCLE
Dead Comment
Oh geez I dunno, surely now it's over for them
With Kubernetes, actually fast storage if you need it. Can scale up to AI demands if you need it.
Or proxmox or the like if you're small enough.
Compared to standing up literally any Linux distro and KVM, K8s remains an overly complex PITA to get off the ground and integrated into an org on the cheap/free. In that area, it handily loses to even Microsoft Hyper-V in the “just get us going” category of business adoption/velocity.
I’d really, really like to see K8s more streamlined for initial deployment than it is. It’s getting better, but I generally still have to grudgingly recommend a premium, managed control plane for any serious deployment.
Enterprise software licensing, support contracts, and technical account managers (TAMs) often run into hundreds of thousands or millions annually per organization. Yet, in practice, support tickets go unresolved or ignored, even for large clients.
The software quality of our most expensive products is extremely poor and unreliable, almost across the board. Many products suffer from bugs, outdated features, or incompatibility issues that disrupt operations. In development roles, this means wasted time on workarounds, custom patches, or integrations that shouldn't be necessary. For a non-small organization, this scales up to significant productivity losses and hidden costs in overhead.
These companies actively alienate us, the customer, through their business practices. Changes like aggressive licensing shifts (e.g., moving from per-core to per-employee models) force reevaluations and migrations and eroding trust (i.e. Oracle with Java, VMWare fiasco). This isn't isolated—it's a pattern where short-term revenue grabs risk long-term relationships, yet companies seem unfazed.
This jacks the entire ecosystem up. These practices stifle innovation by locking customers into suboptimal tools, increase overall IT spend industry-wide, and contribute to employee burnout in dev and ops teams.
It seems like it’s a race to the bottom. The strategy is to create an ecosystem with high switching costs and vendor lock-in. It just doesn’t seem sustainable, yet- it keeps truckin’ along.
There is very little incentive to produce high-quality software, to not alienate your customers, and to support the thing you already sold. Those things cost money. Money paid for those things is money not paid to shareholders, and that's the ultimate incentive in our system.
They've got you by the balls, and secretly, your CEO thinks their CEO is a genius for thinking up and implementing that business model. Pay up.
I think some of what I'm trying to portray is that this should be the incentive. Either do it or you don't have a customer. Yet, the customers don't hold this standard.
As an individual consumer, if I don't get what I pay for, I return it or can even submit a charge-back. Is it not irresponsible of business management to not do the same?
I was a beta tester for VMWare way back when. It was one of the first pieces of software I bought out of college. It was like manna from heaven, I could commit to Linux and have a backdoor for Windows and I needed it, and I did from time to time. I also did security testing over the years and once you've joined a machine to a Windows domain, it never can be made the same again. Vmware enabled that business without a spare laptop or spending tons of time rebuilding it. I've maintained the license since then, 25ish years. Bought it for the Mac too. I can't think of a worse transition than the one they're doing.
The current breed of managers in the US have decided to fire developers, abuse customers (you have nowhere to go) and burn all the money on AI (they believe it’ll solve all their problems).
Morale will remain low until an alternative spawns. Kinda with electric cars. Europeans, Japanese and Koreans are now forced to up their game and lower their prices.
Just because "all" software companies have American entities doesn't mean you "won", that's just what happens when a jurisdiction let's companies do anything even if it's detrimental to society as a whole.
10s of millions on Adobe - admin side craps out all the time, terrible outsourced support (easy to escalate past them but still annoying that we sometimes have to start there)
10s of millions on Microsoft - Laissez-faire attitude about when they will update stuff during renewals and true-ups. Not specific date. Little help.
Broadcom - PE play (as we know from Broadcom) to squeeze every penny out. Have been through several account managers now. They won't sell through VARs anymore, only direct, and to get anything beyond VCF you have to be on a very special list that supposedly the CEO personally approves (which is beyond mind-boggling).
Starting to see some post production software be licensed based on having limited amount of contiguous time zones which is also crazy for a global company
Note: Media and healthcare industries may be SOL because there are lots of content and cybersec 'requirements' for having private clouds. Curious what others in those industries are doing
A lot of it is the cost of doing business. We'll see how it goes when MS moves to the consumption model they're proposing.
As a random example, SQL Server Standard Edition is limited to a “very generous” maximum of four sockets, 24 cores, or 128 GB of memory.
That’s just slightly bigger then a laptop these days!
Azure offers a new VM series where the max memory limit of SQL Std is exceeded with just four cores (8 vCPUs): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/siz...
There are VMs available now that have crossed the “kilo core” threshold. You can draw pictures in their task manager by creatively putting load on the processors: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/siz...
The problem here is that Microsoft kept their license limits as constants relative to a reality that moved exponentially. They would have to have applied “inflation”, but they just saw their sales figures go up and up… and nobody will rock that boat!
Inevitably they’ll keep choking their product until it turns purple and dies. It’s a force of nature, there is nothing anybody can do do counter this naked corporate greed that is enabled by accidental mis-pricing. This can never be corrected, except by letting products die and be replaced wholesale in the market.
Time to learn PostgreSQL, I guess…
My favorite thing about leaving that job was never having to deal with VMWare ever again.
> Many mid-market and regional operators view the new [subscription] structure as untenable and are actively exploring alternatives.. Nutanix emerged early as the leading competitive alternative to VMware.. over 2,700 new customers.. driven by organizations fleeing VMware's new pricing model.. [including] more than 50 Global 2000 companies, representing major enterprises willing to undertake complex, multi-year infrastructure overhauls.. With VMware serving approximately 200,000 customers globally, Nutanix sees most of the migration opportunity still ahead.
These aren't Broadcom's ICPs.
> Nutanix
Good for Nutanix. Market segmentation exists for a reason.
The article is also written by Steve McDowell, who's analyst firm (NAND Research) is sponsored by Nutanix [0][1]
Welcome to Enterprise Sales.
[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=93FbVZGDXoY
[1] - https://www.nutanix.com/theforecastbynutanix/technology/hype...