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Comment by difosfor | Hacker News Reader

So Broadcom is basically just milking VMware until it completely dies? I guess you should always consider the risk of a company buying a product you use and then doing this

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VMWare has been dying a death of 1000 cuts for years. It's been passed around to now the third owner. They created an entire market and have been watching it erode away.

VMware has been increasing revenue year after year [1]. That seems quite the opposite of dying?

[1] https://www.netcials.com/financial-revenue-history-usa/11246...

not if it keeps losing market share.

A rising tide makes the pie bigger. Something like that.

Is virtualization really a growing pie, these days? Big players eat everything, and they have their own solutions typically.

VMware are the big players

I think he means AWS/Azure/GCP and other hyperscalers.

The other possibility, if it's a shrinking market, is they are just strip-mining it.

This is exactly the problem with optimizing metrics though. It seems like they’re getting more money from less customers but it puts them at might higher risk that those big customers will churn and tank the company which also increases as the price goes up as it will eventually hit a point where they can find something cheaper.

> VMware has been increasing revenue year after year [1]. That seems quite the opposite of dying?

And what have its profits been over the same time period?

Also, how did maximizing numbers work out for Boeing?

That's what enshittification looks like right before the company dies.

Yeah but how does it make any business sense for Broadcom to be doing this? They could have raised prices 100% and fewer people would flee and they'd make more money overall. 1,000% price raises are just plain extortion.

Raise prices. Layoff staff. Less support. = more cash flow (Short term).

In order to sell?, spinoff?, or use the cash to finance something else?

If the action of a company doesn't seem to make sense, ask yourself: could you imagine an incentive structure within the company that could lead to such actions?

Buy, extract as much money as possible, then dump the carcass. I'm sure they did the math on this.

This is the classic "golden goose" strategy. Why wait around all week for steady returns when you can just rip the thing open and see what you can get for the internal organs.

Whenever companies make moves that people don't like, the comments go on as if they haven't thought any of it through

They knew they would lose customers, they've factored that into their business plan

Considering half the comments are “Proxmox” and “Virtualbox/Parallels” are so much better anyway, I’m guessing most commenters in here are extremely naive and not aware of the IT landscape.

The issues of large scale infrastructure are so different to running a glorified NAS at home

Mathematically if they can extract say 1.5 times the money they used to buy something in 3 years. It is a good deal for them. And even better if they can extract more money beyond those 3 years and then sell what is still left to reclaiming bit more money. Making 15% a year on investment and it fully paying back is not bad move.

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