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.
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.
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.
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.
Or vendors just abiding by contracts they've already signed!
If you have a contract that says they can change the price at any time, and you're a business, that's on you.