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Comment by ygritte | Hacker News Reader

Broadcom fucked up the VMWare products but good. No more products for individuals, and the enterprise cloud is losing customers.

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Two of my family members built a good hunk of their careers on VMware products. This is the poster child story for why to not put all of your eggs in a single closed source basket.

Yep. One of my colleagues went all in on Crowdstrike a couple of years back. That went hilariously badly for him due to obvious reasons.

Not hilarious to him I bet..

Well we warned him. He got paid to set it up and then paid to get rid of it so it went rather well for him but not in the way he though it was going to. Plenty of time to roll out a plan B which worked out better for him anyway.

Same here, but I jumped ship to cloud, Kubernetes & Co. some years ago. I know many who still live well on VMware products, even if they are just busy migrating workloads to other platforms.

It was easy to miss between all the back and forth, but VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion are now free for all users, including for commercial use [1], and since last month, ESXi is also free, again [2].

[1] https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/11/11/vmware-...

[2] https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/399823/vmwar...

I have seen [1] a long time ago. But AFAIK until this day, the Workstation installer still asks whether you are either a private user or have a license key... So is it really free?

Increasing price five-fold and losing three out of four customers still means you come out ahead revenue-wise, and your internal costs probably go down as you have so many fewer customers to support

Sounds like an interesting exit strategy.

it's not a sustainable approach, because every single one of the customers you've "retained" will be looking to dump you as soon as possible

Some percentage of customers can’t leave if they want to. The ones who have laid off and cost cut to such a level they can no longer undertake projects to move to another virtualization environment. I’m at one such company. The staff we have now couldn’t do it in a year, or even two.

> The staff we have now couldn’t do it in a year, or even two.

You're talking like two years is long term...

> it's not a sustainable approach

For the current Broadcom leadership this doesn't have to be sustainable, just bring in enough of a profit to justify the whole thing. They do not want a slow and steady profit stream but a big squeeze and done. I bet they got what they hoped for.

It’s like oil drilling, completely unsustainable but great money to be made short-term. It just needs to be milkable long enough to make more money than the acquisition price

what happens to a software product when it has a small fraction of the original users? all that free testing as customer support shifts to someone else's platform, eventually

but i think the 'eventually' is the reason this is working for them

VMware's VM products are on way out as enterprises are all Kubernetes with containers or serverles functions and this will natural trickle down.

I suspect the strategy is to extract maximum cash whilst they can.

I deal, with mid size (200-800) people and there is no k8s or serverless to be seen anywhere.

Personally I don't have a huge amount of experience with either, so I'm possibly a bit biased, but I see k8s as either a hyperscale solution or someone wanting to be cool and trendy.

Same goes for serverless, other than niche use cases of say running python code in a 100% Azure ecosystem when you just have absolutely zero other choice.

That's why I used the term trickle down, meaning in time.

It may not be k8s as we know it today, but many SMEs are most certainly using containers, via Docker.

Ultimately containers use less resources than a full VM and allow dependency management.

VMs is a reducing business.

I generally see docker (used) as a second tier isolation. IT hands out VMs to vendors/teams, and then the vendor/team spins up 3-4 containers in that VM to suit their needs.

I'm aware it's technically possible to have a large, wide fleet of containers...but I don't really see it going that way (at all).

My current thoughts of why is separation of knowledge - IT knows how to manage infra and virtualisation, and the vendor/teams know how their individual docker containers need to be set up/work.

I do agree full virtualisation is probably on the decline, but the current tech is definitely staying around in my size of business.

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