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But all of these moves have been with the goals of innovating faster
Fail.
meeting our customers’ needs more effectively,
Fail.
and making it easier to do business with us.
Fail.
If the goal is milking your customers for more money then it all makes sense. At least until they start migrating away from VMware and your new client stream completely dries up.
Yes, the only thing that Broadcom gives a shit about here:
Broadcom expects VMware revenue to grow double-digits quarter over quarter for the rest of the fiscal year.
The ‘ol late-stage capitalism adage “growth above all else”
"Short-term growth above all else, then lay everyone off and find the next business to buy out and ruin"
Executives care only about their bonuses, and the best way to boost them is to milk companies on the short term even if it ruins them on the long term. There is no incentive to care about long term.
Investors reward this behavior. The system is designed to destroy good things.
Translation: We are gonna gouge the ever living fuck out of every single customer.
At least until they start migrating away from VMware and your new client stream completely dries up.
This is a feature. They take a product that you can't easily move off of, like VMware or Symantec. They jack up the prices. A few people leave, but some people struggle to leave and pay lots of money. Demand drops, they cut most of the staff and put the product on life support, and eventually they kill it. By that time they've bought another company to do the same.
They're basically just milking old cows to death.
Totally unrelated, but that's actually what we're doing with cows. Killing them of at age 3 bc they don't give enough milk anymore
It's what we always did with cows. To have a dairy cow you need to repeatedly get it pregnant. Why keep feeding an older less productive cow that has already calved 4 or 5 times when you've already got yourself a few new heifers.
fyi most dairy cows are kept beyond the age of 3. You can see on the World Dairy Expo YouTube channel that there are cows producing up to the age of 6.
Heifers reach puberty at about 12 months old, but some delay until up to 20 months old. After breeding they gestate for 283 days (almost 9 1/2 months), give birth to their calf and give milk for about 10 months. "Culling" a cow at the age of three would mean only getting 2 full lactation cycles of milk from them, which isn't super economical.
You're not too far off the mark, though: once any individual animal becomes less profitable than a new one could be, they get culled.
Said it before, they're dumping low value customers for high value customers. This can be a legit strategy!
But not in this case. As you said, they're going to milk the cow dead. We wouldn't touch VMware with a ten-foot frog. Leaning into Proxmox ATM, working great so far.
A lot of people talk about Proxmox but I wouldn't be surprised if redhat open shift decided to throw its hat into the ring as an HP or Dell partner.
While open shift can somewhat accommodate VM workloads, it feels like an afterthought. Really the goal is to charge how your applications are run.
However, VMware presides over staunchly "old fashioned" ships that think in terms of "machines". So ProxMox is a bit more similar.
RedHat did have ovirt which would have been a closer platform, but they ditched that in favor of openstack, which was also VM centered but "cloudy", which also isn't the target model of on premise virtualization (openstack had other problems too), and now it's openshift, which is largely a "kubernetes is a buzz word, let's go, also as an afterthought some VM hosting to give some semblance of continuity for users we yanked through RHEV, openstack, and for now openshift"
It might play a role, but ProxMox may be better situated to be like for like. Microsoft is of course pushing their azure stack for those wiling to get tied up into azure a bit. I suspect openshift will continue to mainly focus on cloud hosted VMs rather than retool they're go to market to better capture those abandoning VMware. After all, since the story is "reduce costs", that's not an appealing scenario to red hat/IBM, since it inherently puts an obvious upper bound on revenue and the customers will be those that demonstrated they are the most ready to migrate when unhappy.
I think this is very interesting. I've been investigating the solutions and found that a lot of other platforms like scale hci, virtuozzo, and oracle VM are all based on the oVirt/Openstack platforms but have been customized.
Openshift and Suse Harvester both have a very similar Kubernetes first approach which I think is interesting. Harvester seems to rely on KubeVirt to deploy "legacy workloads" (probably windows).
The reason I mention openshift though is because I've been paying attention to Wendell, level1techs, and the level1 forums and Wendell keeps hinting that Redhat/IBM openshift + intel is being used as a VDI platform featuring Intel flexGPUs for a secret customer (I wouldn't be surprised if it was a government facility like the national laboratory near Knoxville). I'm just trying to envision how that deployment looks.
In his blog post, Tan defended the subscription-only licensing model, calling it "the industry standard."
“Industry standard” my ass.
If Adobe hadn’t started the trend by lusting after Blizzard’s subscription model and ultimately emulating it, we’d all be a lot better off.
Not to mention our wallets being eternally thankful.
It is the industry standard now, it never had to be but they all got greedy and Adobe kickstarted the slide
Free and open source software is the industry standard
My job estimated our VMware cost will be 10 times more expensive. We’re moving to the cloud as soon as possible.
A panicky move to the cloud might be extremely expensive too. Especially if you don't have cloud ready applications (old on prem apps, full fledged VMs, etc. )
It’s not panic. We already have direct connects to AWS and Azure. It’s something we’ve been working on for five years now.
That's interesting, because hosting anything in the cloud is usually way more expensive than on prem. We just pulled a large number of our systems back out of gcp because of it.
Well that was my point, moving to the cloud requires drastic changes in the way your infra works. You cannot have full fledged VMs running at 10% of capacity 95% of the time like you do on prem. You need to be able to scale up and down on a whim with containers/micro services/whatever you call it. I've worked with a lot of companies that never understood that and bitterly regretted moving to the cloud.
Yup. I’ve seen companies that wanted to “get to the cloud” and didn’t want to spend any money on redeveloping their systems so it turned into a lift-and-shift which just drove their costs up.
Hey hey my company is doing exactly this right now
"Get EVERYTHING OFF PREM. SEND ALL OF IT TO GCP NOW"
My company just came to their senses on this.
We demonstrated one product worked well in the cloud by completely re-architecting it. It was a two year project. However then management was all gung ho, and set an extremely aggressive deadline, meaning lift and shift was the only possibility. However just before the new year, management finally realized just how expensive it was going to be, and changed their mind.
The thing is, our products are internet services, so we have to maintain data centers and networking at many locations around the world, and need to have the people to support that. However datacenters are not our core business and there’s a good argument that we should get out of it. Just not that way
O absolutely, but most of these companies don't want to spend money to actually get to that point since they're going to have to redev their applications and design, so they just tell the engineers to put everything one to one in the cloud.
We sell hardware built for and bundled with VMware. Customers are returning it. This isn't a good look.
Man I wish we could do this, but our customers won't agree to processing their data in the cloud. We're going to get milked so hard.
Pure damage control lingo. Anyone in the game for a while knows exactly how Broadcom operates. Theyre not hanging around while they squeeze the juice out until it becomes another SAP or Oracle. If he thinks a subscription model isn’t going to cause a mass exodus, he is a fool.
So I may be biased but what is vmwares USP? From my limited experience it was a slightly more polished GUI for creating VMs and the ability to run on older pre-virt hardware. Is the experience still objectively better than the alternatives?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a blog post Thursday, Tan noted that Broadcom spent 18 months evaluating and buying VMware.
But all of these moves have been with the goals of innovating faster, meeting our customers’ needs more effectively, and making it easier to do business with us.
Tan believes that the changes will ultimately "provide greater profitability and improved market opportunities" for channel partners.
Additionally, Broadcom killing VMware perpetual licensing has reportedly upended financials for numerous businesses.
In a March “User Group Town Hall,” attendees complained about “price rises of 500 and 600 percent,” The Register reported.
In his blog post, Tan defended the subscription-only licensing model, calling it "the industry standard."
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