It was a dumb move. They had a niche market cornered, (serious) enterprises with on-prem infrastructure. Sure, it was the standard back in the late 2000’s to host virtualization on-prem but since then, the only people who have not outsourced infrastructure hosting to cloud providers, have reasons not to, including financial reasons. The cloud is not cheaper than self-hosting, serverless applications can be more expensive, storage and bandwidth is more limited, and performance is worse. Good example of this is openai vs ollama on-prem. Ollama is 10,000x cheaper, even when you include initial buy-in.
Let VMware fail. At this point they are worth more as a lesson to the industry, turn on your users and we will turn on you.
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.
