IBM play works because they have 60 years of legacy and path dependent development. You can't simply turn into IBM. And that strategy also made sure that IBM was the one delivering hardware to hypergrowth companies like google and friends. And it made IBM itself not into a large cloud company either.

Until they were acquired by BRCM. Then oh well, you know, typical BRCM behaviors awaits.

Not really. On the smaller scale there was no reason outside of familiarity to run VMware over hyper-v.

This will be a shift for on-prem deployments. For cloud solutions running VMware in AWS/Azure, unless those renewals go up significantly, most of VMwares mrr is already locked in and the people running these setups generally refuse to learn how the cloud works so it’s a pure lift and shift mentality.

But the pattern begins, broadcom buys VMware does nothing increase prices. Why would any sane client stay around to get VC squeezed.

The software always was fairly horrible behind the scenes, albeit with a nice user interface. However I've spent years and years dealing with the sheer awfulness which is VDDK (https://libguestfs.org/nbdkit-vddk-plugin.1.html) which leaves a bitter taste.