They failed to transition from technology leader to commodity product.
Well, Broadcom clearly saw that VMware was on the trajectory to be supplanted by either cloud aligned virtualization solutions or built in operating system virtualization. They failed to really carve out another niche because even in the most dedicated VMware shop, all the advances happened in operating systems by other vendors.
So Broadcom decided explicitly to gouge the hell out of customers too afraid to migrate losing any chance at new customers (which they probably weren’t going to get any way) and scaring away current customers (I recall some report they felt they could alienate 90% of their customers and still be happy with how hard they were gouging the remaining 10%).
Literally the Hock Tan playbook. Buy a foundational technology and jack the price way up assuming the whales will keep paying while mid and small customers fall away. Did it with Symantec, started to do it with Bitnami but backed off a bit due to massive backlash.
They bank on the asspain of switching tech tooling being greater than the financial pain of the price gouging. But hey, that’s capitalism for ya.
Well, Broadcom clearly saw that VMware was on the trajectory to be supplanted by either cloud aligned virtualization solutions or built in operating system virtualization. They failed to really carve out another niche because even in the most dedicated VMware shop, all the advances happened in operating systems by other vendors.
So Broadcom decided explicitly to gouge the hell out of customers too afraid to migrate losing any chance at new customers (which they probably weren’t going to get any way) and scaring away current customers (I recall some report they felt they could alienate 90% of their customers and still be happy with how hard they were gouging the remaining 10%).
In short, going exactly according to plan.
Literally the Hock Tan playbook. Buy a foundational technology and jack the price way up assuming the whales will keep paying while mid and small customers fall away. Did it with Symantec, started to do it with Bitnami but backed off a bit due to massive backlash.
They bank on the asspain of switching tech tooling being greater than the financial pain of the price gouging. But hey, that’s capitalism for ya.