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Comment by sqircles | Hacker News Reader

I worked in software acquisitions for a large organization and it was really eye opening to see how insane some of these companies are when it comes to pricing customers out. I always wondered - what is the motive? They make pricing structure changes that aren't even considerable for any organization that has any fashion of a budget. VMWare was one example where our already insane costs that had nearly tripled over the previous 4 years were quoted to triple at the end of the period.

Another was a Java SE licensing change that went from around $1k per instance, of which we had about 5. Mind you there is little to no maintenance support provided here. The increase was to $5.25 per organizational employee per instance, whether they used the instance or not - of which we had 100k. The choice was obviously a simple one.

I can only assume very few organization stay on the ride for those kinds of changes, but obviously they must - but why?

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It might take a large org several years to migrate off core systems like VMWare. If you think the customer is likely to churn within a few years anyway it makes economic sense to hike their fee.

This in turn introduces a lot of economic inefficiency, for no good reason. I think regulation would be useful here.

> I think regulation would be useful here.

Or vendors just abiding by contracts they've already signed!

Contrast one regulation vs. thousands of litigations by companies who don't always have the expertise or budget to pursue complex legal procedures.

If you have a contract that says the price is $1k, pay them $1k and don't answer their calls. They can sue you and they'll lose.

If you have a contract that says they can change the price at any time, and you're a business, that's on you.

At any one time, something like 90% of all enterprises are engaged in at least one multi-year strategic move away from an abusive vendor. In the tech world, these might be Oracle, Broadcom, (formerly) IBM, or (even more formerly) Computer Associates.

Typically you're looking at a year or two of discovery, audits and planning, another year or two to cover the main transition, and then up to five years of mopping up.

There are other near-ubiquitous vendors (eg. Microsoft and Cisco) who manage to be tolerated as annoying rather than outright abusive. I guess they take a slightly different view of how hard to squeeze their customers.

used to work at a company that was tied to literally all of those. life was miserable.

then oracle cut costs on next gen exo-data stuff and agreed to waive some license costs this time and bam just doubled down on them again. ugh.

I did a gig at a Fortune 500 that had actually succeeded in entirely eliminating Oracle. Life was still miserable.

They lived in fear of something slipping through the net. So print servers were switched off because they contained an embedded Oracle JRE. And deployment pipelines that used Hashicorp's Packer had to be rewritten to eliminate the VirtualBox plugin (despite it not being used). Office coffee machines were looked at with suspicion.

Every vendor had to be queried, every piece of software had to be tested and have appropriate controls put in place. There were pre-emptive audits and endless compliance procedures.

There was so much work involved that any cost savings must have been fairly minimal.

It's hard (=expensive) to change all the internal infrastructure or sometimes even internal processes, and if companies manage to stay just a bit cheaper than their custumers cost to rewrite "everything", they'll get the money. Even if some customers do so, with the price hike, they still earn more from the ones who don't.

There is also risk introduced by change. Risk is very scary when you are in management.

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