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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Broadcom turned up the heat on our pot fast enough that we’re evacuating over to proxmox. I and several others in IT had run it at home for a while, so when Broadcom made the definite losses to continue on VMWare far higher than the likely losses from any migration outage, it became a no-brainer to migrate.

Migrating part of the farm and A/B testing shows good results and we’ll be able to complete it in-place before the next pizzo payment to Broadcom is due.

Thanks for the nudge, Broadcom! As far as I’m concerned, Broadcom and Oracle are tied for first on my “do not voluntarily do business with” list. Equaling Oracle in this way is a feat…

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I place Broadcom higher. At least Oracle seems to want customers that pay. I can't find evidence that of Broadcom wanting customers.

The CEO explicitly said the only customers they're interested in is the 600 customers who are responsible for 80% of their revenue. The are actively trying to shed all others; it's simply not worth the overhead costs otherwise.

That's one way to do business. Run tour product into obscurity so there are few qualified managers and admins in the market after 10 years, and everyone has become familiar with cheaper and now more prevalent alternatives.

slow clap

Reminds me of the saying that business's are either sowing or reaping investments.

Broadcom definitely seems to be in a reaping stage.

Broadcom (cloud vs on-prem conflict of interest) is sowing cloud silicon for VMware refugees.

There are customers that cost more to keep than you earn - firing those customers is a useful activity at all levels of business. However Broadcom has a lot of products that we would generally expect to scale to a lot of customers and they are acting like they are bespoke things that don't scale. Their business model doesn't match what their products generally need.

I expect things like VMWare to disappear in a few years because some competitors taking those other customers will slowly make things better until those still buying VMWare go elsewhere anywhere because it is good enough. There is only so long they can sell bundles of everything before customers decide the total price is too high - so it might not even be VMWare's competitors are good enough so much as everywhere else is good enough and VMWare needs to be tossed too.

VMWare was for sale in the first place because it is obviously not going to be the case in 10 years that every dentist’s office and car dealership needs 3-10 instances of Windows Server in the closet. It makes sense to sell to someone who can extract as much value as possible from it on the way to zero.

I'd throw IBM in that list as well... Unless you literally have money to burn, I've avoided Oracle and IBM for decades.

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