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Comment by TomVDB | Hacker News Reader

After being acquired by Avago, Broadcom ceased to be a single company. It’s a conglomerate of entities/BUs that are explicitly asked to NOT work cooperatively, so that each entity can be sold at moment’s notice if it doesn’t deliver the right financial results anymore.

Chances are that the current leadership doesn’t care about how VMware operates, as long as it cuts enough costs to increase metrics that Wall Street considers important.

Expect major cuts in R&D, receptionists, travel expenses, general benefits, and virtually no hiring of college grads or interns. You’ll be on the phone in a queue for hours to get outsourced IT support.

Support of open source should be the least of your worries.

Stock price might go up though…

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This is exactly correct. Hock (love him or hate him) knows exactly what he is doing, and is entirely unapologetic. He looks only at margin. You have $10B revenue stream at 2% profit margin? Hock will happily cut that in half for a 10% margin he can depend on. It's all about ARR. Great for shareholders and those with a mountain of RSU's... but not so great for employees. Was at CA...saw it happen.

> It's all about ARR.

You argued the exact opposite? You're saying it's all about EBITDA...

I don't think so. Certainly, EBITDA is part of any story. What I was trying to convey was that Broadcom very much wants their customers to be engaged in a strong subscription model... big, recurring license agreements. Customers who, year after year, can be relied upon to send Broadcom money...even if they buy nothing new. Broadcom likes those Big Companies who can be counted upon to spend a consistent (but never shrinking) amount every year. Hock is ruthless in this...and has a pretty good bullshit detector... again, he probably makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Nothing wrong with that approach... it's very pragmatic... especially for shareholders. Broadcom might give you more for your money every year, but you will never spend less of it.

Thanks for the clarification - it's the corporate-shoggoth of HP>Agilent>Infineon+LSI>Avago "Broadcom Inc." not underground-dungeon-scandal "Broadcom Corporation". Their NASDAQ ticker is still AVGO. :)

> not underground-dungeon-scandal "Broadcom Corporation"

TIL: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/11/nicholas200811

… and here all I wanted was updates to fusion and decent HBAs…

Broadcom Inc. bought Broadcom Corp. in 2015 (and presumable got its name from it).

I was part of Symantec when we were acquired. I didn’t agree with all Broadcoms moves, but they empowered us to really cut the fact and focus on what we were good at.

Cut the fat, I think you mean.

Not sure if that was a typo, eggcorn, or pun on truth and fiction post-acquisition...

Thank you, I did indeed mean cut the fat. I need to cut the fat on my fat fingers!

I was very surprised when the product quality went up, for the Symantec software I use.

To be fair, prior to broadcom purchase symantec was not known fo high product quality

In the sysadmin world, Backup Exec and Norton products are meme's at this point, examples of the worst kind of software

so I am not sure how it could have gone down in quality

The consumer grade Symantec software and enterprise Symantec software were always different.

Norton never had any real bearing on SEP.

The consumer side of Symantec was not sold to Broadcom and became Norton Lifelock.

It's amazing our system rewards all of those things. Cutting r&d, cutting jobs, cutting downstream contractors, using profit for stock buybacks, etc

Optimizing for efficiency isn't a bad thing. The real problem is the larger economic feedback loop based around keeping the number of hours worked the same. So the efficiency gains are effectively lost, and the average worker is left still depending on the ever-optimized structure rather than being able to accumulate enough wealth to escape it and create new structures.

Consistent with my experience as a customer of other Broadcom purchases.

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