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Comment by nikanj | Hacker News Reader

It's a solid strategy: Ask for 5x money from the 25% of customers who can't make the jump. End up making more money you made in the past, lose 75% of the support burden

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The only downside is that you'll never get any new customers, and your product will wither and die.

That's a problem for the next quarter!

For the next CEO

VMware & on-prem is dying anyways, there’s not much opportunity to turn that one around.

That's making the wrong assumption that those 25% of customers will just sit idly by. Their migration away won't be easy, but you can bet that all of them have been at least thinking if not acting on contingencies since the acquisition was first announced. They might do the initial renewals, but within a year or two most of them will start moving away and making their VMware estates smaller, for reduced costs and also vastly improved quality for everyone involved. Once the cat is out of the bag (Broadcom forcing them to rethink their strategy), very few will remain - there are so many better options than VMware out there.

> It's a solid strategy

Except for the situations when it loses you a customer:

* https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/22/computershare_vm_migr...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40452260

I think you missed the part of the strategy where losing 75% of customers is actually part of the plan.

> I think you missed the part of the strategy where losing 75% of customers is actually part of the plan.

Yes, but they want that 75% to be a particular type of customer, i.e., all the small ones. I'm not sure if a 14,000 employee, 24,000-VM customer would be considered "small":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computershare

It's called "the Oracle way".

Isn't this entire article attempting to explain why that strategy isn't working in this instance?

This assumes the 25% won't also end up going - just a bit later.

the fact that everyone is saying "stay away from VMware products" is just a bonus, I suppose :)

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