The view of Broadcom is that VMWare has low growth potential and the route to maximum short term financial returns is to extract as much money as possible from the largest customers.

So the strategy is to squeeze the 600 largest customers until they bleed, knowing they are so entrenched they cannot easily migrate. If the next couple of thousand stuck around as well that would be nice, but not essential. The long tail of hundreds of thousands of customers paying a few dollars a month they would gladly be rid of.