I don't think we really need those quotes. Broadcom bought an existing, successful company, and immediately skyrocketed the price of their most used commercial offering.
You don't need a degree in business to surmise that short term profits will also skyrocket but you will eventually lose the market.
The term of art is Profit Taking. When you cash out your reputation to make a big quarterly profit. Did they also slash the research and development teams? Classic VC behavior.
Yup, or that bad view of Broadcom is because of the price hikes.
I had a meeting with IT where I was worried they were finally coming after my proxmox box they "didn't know about". Turns out they saw their vmware bill and suddenly had questions.
Private equity... or Broadcom... bleed dying things dry. It's arbitrage on companies that are too slow to adopt new technology. Instead of watching something die slowly squeeze it for everything it's got by making the inflexible companies pay for their inability to change.
The end of a dead product is the same, but the financial reaper is betting they can make more money killing something quickly.
No, but Broadcom didn't buy them to build a company over time. They have a long pattern of buying a tech company, jacking up the prices, and making enough money (before customers switch) to more than make up for the purchase price of the company, netting them a tidy profit. Plus, at the end what they're left with isn't completely value-less either.
Everyone who followed Broadcom (and that included many VMWare employees) knew exactly what was coming the moment the acquisition was announced.
But they were a mature company. Why would growth be the expectation?
Note: I’m not asking for the Reddit armchair kvetching about the evils of modern capitalism and the failings of line-must-go-up. I’m wondering why, when serious financial decision-makers are involved, it makes sense to blow something up rather than steadily take profits over time, even if those profits aren’t always going up.
Because more than sales growth also technology growth was done. Nobody new is excited to use VMWare, the only big significant customers of VMWare are the ones it already has. At best you get a trickle of new customers already so accustomed to your product that they don't want to figure out something new. All of that is a sign for a long term slow death where to stay profitable you have to slowly lower headcount and raise prices.
Like a sitcom in the 7th season or a champion fighter approaching 40 you quit near the top.
Totally impossible. Closed source software often contains IP licensed from other entities. Just because a company folds doesn't mean they can violate licensing agreements.
> Just because a company folds doesn't mean they can violate licensing agreements.
It does if that's the law. Every jurisdiction routinely overrules contracts as unenforceable on the basis of some overriding law, so it wouldn't even really be that unusual. Whether it's a good idea or not is another question and one that depends almost entirely on second, third and higher order effects.
There probably is a world where all software is libre software and we still see similar rates of development, but it's not at all clear how you could get there. Especially not if you cared about the damage caused by upending the business models of a significant fraction of the world economy.
The biggest blocker there is probably whatever remaining creditors to the company when it goes under then have claims on remaining assets like the software.
One solution would be putting something in the tax code such that donating the code to an open source foundation gives a bigger benefit than simply writing it off as a total loss and destroying it.
PepsiCo had been raising the prices on their snacks, including Doritos, far faster than their costs or the rate of inflation.
They "suddenly" realized that many less people were willing to pay $7 for a bag of Doritos and that they had priced their product higher than they should have.
There's a curve, not unlike the Laffer Curve, that applies to everything you are selling; something that Broadcom is learning (though their stock has had crazy high appreciation over the last number of years!)
And now much like Pepsi, those that found their store-brand version of KVM to replace VMware are certainly happy with their new chips and don’t want to switch back if they don’t have to…
British Hong Kong bank HSBC Holdings plc is the common institutional shareholder pushing for adding friction to self hosting to push customers to the cloud. Avago purchased Broadcom for the same reason. Not private equity, but Chinese-British banks.
It's worth it. The increased participation and discussion have given a little momentum in usability, and AI on hand makes the learning curve very manageable. If you're already familiar with vmware, virtualization in general, it's a pretty easy transition.
I switched from VMWare to Proxmox a few years ago because Proxmox supported a wider range of network cards that were more common in the cheap desktop computers I use in my homelab, whilst VMWare almost required an Intel network card (which was usually fine for server hardware).
It was a surprisingly easy transition that I have not regretted one bit. I'm not sure whether there that was an actual migration path, without reinstalling servers from scratch. Homelab meant it didn't quite have the requirements of a production system...
I'm kinda hoping AI agents pass the threshold of being able to reliably do a complete production migration sometime this year. We've got a couple years left on the vmware contract, and it's just obscene what they've done, with the price hikes, degraded support, etc.
At this point they're more an enterprise scheme to maximize license profiteering for compatible software and OS "per core" licensing in conjunction with hardware platform providers. It'd be cool if the support were worth the price, but in most enterprise cases, you're going to save a lot of money if you pay enough full time staff to purchase, build, maintain, and operate a virtualization environment compared to what the enterprise platforms provide. In most cases, you'll save more than enough to keep a better specced system completely redundant with spare hardware on hand.
Honestly? VMs are a level of complexity I haven't felt a reason to fuss around with at home for at least the past five years. Just not interested.
I'm told that Kubevirt with Kubernetes has also been a winner among customers post Broadcom acquisition who were really reluctant to go beyond VMware previously.
Proxmox can do containers too and has other benefits like really good ZFS support. I only have a couple of VMs and everything else in containers on my little Proxmox server.
Proxmox can do LXC and has some experimental support for converting Docker based images... that said, it's not the same as Docker/Podman support, which are more feature rich.
I would suggest at least a minimal Linux Server VM if you're running containers, underneath ProxMox or on a bare metal install if you don't need other virtualization on said server.
It couldn't possibly making a simple software update cost 21x the previous cost to run the software to the point changing to a competitor is cheaper than maintaining VMware.
Even though VMware Fusion (for Mac) is free* and very good, Broadcom is pushing me away to Parallels for silly reasons.
The reason: No matter how I try, even as a registered customer, I can't find a way to download current versions.
When I run VMware Fusion it tells me there's a new version, with bug fixes, support for newer macOS, etc. Would I like to download it? (Months ago it said the URL to check for a new version was broken.). Sure, I click, update please. It takes me to a Broadcom page where I'm supposed to sign in or register, give it my personal and work details, then I can download the new version.
I login because I already have an account. In my account, I can see the older versions of VMware Fusion, including the one I'm already running, but the later two versions aren't showing. Even the minor-version increment from the one I'm using isn't showing. I click around until I find where current ones should be, it shows me files in a table. I click the file and it tells me: Not yet, the account is awaiting verification. Come back in a few days.
It's been stuck like that for months.
But wait! I used this account to get VMWare Fusion a year ago. It still lets me download the version I'm using. The account was already verified! Why does it require new account verification just to get a slightly different, minor-version increment with bug fixes of a free product?
Last time I went through this, I ended up using Homebrew. I had a legit Broadcome/VMware account, had signed the agreement to download the update, but Broadcom's site didn't work. So I was delighted to find it in brew, with vastly better packaging than Broadcom's. Unfortunately the brew package is now disabled.
Before that, I had to sign up with Broadcom a second time, because the first account appeared to lose its access to VMware Fusion. I don't know why. Before that, I had to sign up the first time with Broadcom, even though I already had a VMware account as a paying customer of VMware Fusion.
It's been a great product, which I used to pay for and would again. I've used it for over 10 years. It's free now, and still a great product.
Yet I'm looking at switching to Parallels just because Fusion's "free" download process is too broken to use.
I can't imagine Broadcom is making any money from blocking downloads of the supposedly free product. It was their decision to make it free! It must be disheartening to be a developer on VMware Fusion if you know this is going on.
The worst part about the convoluted download process is that it seems someone have actively been making it more difficult since the first iteration, and I can't for the life of me understand why. Is it being done by someone who hates Broadcom? Or perhaps struggle with mental illness? Or is it due to a mix of micro management and extreme incompetence? I can't remember seeing something this bad since the horror shows people managed to create using stuff like Flash and Silverlight.
Probably just an unfortunate side effect of reusing the same systems used for restricted subscription downloads for free product downloads, combined with underfunding for the free product lines.
I've been able to download free Fusion and Workstation, but my ability to download existing versions of perpetually licensed VMware products was removed the day my (non-renewable) maintenance subscription expired, and they've also paywalled the update servers, again even including older updates I'm entitled to under the perpetual license and my (involuntarily) expired subscription.
I don't think we really need those quotes. Broadcom bought an existing, successful company, and immediately skyrocketed the price of their most used commercial offering.
You don't need a degree in business to surmise that short term profits will also skyrocket but you will eventually lose the market.
The term of art is Profit Taking. When you cash out your reputation to make a big quarterly profit. Did they also slash the research and development teams? Classic VC behavior.
Yup, or that bad view of Broadcom is because of the price hikes.
I had a meeting with IT where I was worried they were finally coming after my proxmox box they "didn't know about". Turns out they saw their vmware bill and suddenly had questions.
Private equity... or Broadcom... bleed dying things dry. It's arbitrage on companies that are too slow to adopt new technology. Instead of watching something die slowly squeeze it for everything it's got by making the inflexible companies pay for their inability to change.
The end of a dead product is the same, but the financial reaper is betting they can make more money killing something quickly.
Was VMWare dying prior to the acquisition? I don't really know the financials but that wasn't the impression I had.
No, but Broadcom didn't buy them to build a company over time. They have a long pattern of buying a tech company, jacking up the prices, and making enough money (before customers switch) to more than make up for the purchase price of the company, netting them a tidy profit. Plus, at the end what they're left with isn't completely value-less either.
Everyone who followed Broadcom (and that included many VMWare employees) knew exactly what was coming the moment the acquisition was announced.
Dying no, but their business certainly had a downward trend on it since so much is moving to containers instead.
Doesn’t VMware have Tanzu, a container-based offering? Why not keep trying to adapt?
VMWare din't have a growth trajectory and didn't have a reasonable expectation of one.
You don't make these kinds of sales when you're circling the drain, you do it when you can see that future coming for you.
But they were a mature company. Why would growth be the expectation?
Note: I’m not asking for the Reddit armchair kvetching about the evils of modern capitalism and the failings of line-must-go-up. I’m wondering why, when serious financial decision-makers are involved, it makes sense to blow something up rather than steadily take profits over time, even if those profits aren’t always going up.
Because more than sales growth also technology growth was done. Nobody new is excited to use VMWare, the only big significant customers of VMWare are the ones it already has. At best you get a trickle of new customers already so accustomed to your product that they don't want to figure out something new. All of that is a sign for a long term slow death where to stay profitable you have to slowly lower headcount and raise prices.
Like a sitcom in the 7th season or a champion fighter approaching 40 you quit near the top.
Should be a rule that when this happens and these companies fold that everything is open sourced - at least we'd all get something out of it.
Totally impossible. Closed source software often contains IP licensed from other entities. Just because a company folds doesn't mean they can violate licensing agreements.
> Just because a company folds doesn't mean they can violate licensing agreements.
It does if that's the law. Every jurisdiction routinely overrules contracts as unenforceable on the basis of some overriding law, so it wouldn't even really be that unusual. Whether it's a good idea or not is another question and one that depends almost entirely on second, third and higher order effects.
There probably is a world where all software is libre software and we still see similar rates of development, but it's not at all clear how you could get there. Especially not if you cared about the damage caused by upending the business models of a significant fraction of the world economy.
Nah. No jurisdiction is going to violate the IP rights of a separate company just because one of their customers or partners is forced to liquidate.
The biggest blocker there is probably whatever remaining creditors to the company when it goes under then have claims on remaining assets like the software.
One solution would be putting something in the tax code such that donating the code to an open source foundation gives a bigger benefit than simply writing it off as a total loss and destroying it.
PepsiCo had been raising the prices on their snacks, including Doritos, far faster than their costs or the rate of inflation.
They "suddenly" realized that many less people were willing to pay $7 for a bag of Doritos and that they had priced their product higher than they should have.
There's a curve, not unlike the Laffer Curve, that applies to everything you are selling; something that Broadcom is learning (though their stock has had crazy high appreciation over the last number of years!)
>There's a curve, not unlike the Laffer Curve, that applies to everything you are selling
It's often called the Goldilocks price: not too much, not too little, but just right.
And now much like Pepsi, those that found their store-brand version of KVM to replace VMware are certainly happy with their new chips and don’t want to switch back if they don’t have to…
I stopped using VMware because they stopped supporting newer Linux kernels.
Lack of maintenance => lack of users.
British Hong Kong bank HSBC Holdings plc is the common institutional shareholder pushing for adding friction to self hosting to push customers to the cloud. Avago purchased Broadcom for the same reason. Not private equity, but Chinese-British banks.
This sounds a bit tinfoily but given HSBCs history not impossible; can you show any additional sources to follow?
> Other companies, including Microsoft (Hyper-V) and Proxmox, have also been aggressively courting disgruntled VMware customers.
I think I'm among the few in my peer group who hasn't yet started running Proxmox on their home server.
It's worth it. The increased participation and discussion have given a little momentum in usability, and AI on hand makes the learning curve very manageable. If you're already familiar with vmware, virtualization in general, it's a pretty easy transition.
Highly recommended.
Agreed!
I switched from VMWare to Proxmox a few years ago because Proxmox supported a wider range of network cards that were more common in the cheap desktop computers I use in my homelab, whilst VMWare almost required an Intel network card (which was usually fine for server hardware).
It was a surprisingly easy transition that I have not regretted one bit. I'm not sure whether there that was an actual migration path, without reinstalling servers from scratch. Homelab meant it didn't quite have the requirements of a production system...
I'm kinda hoping AI agents pass the threshold of being able to reliably do a complete production migration sometime this year. We've got a couple years left on the vmware contract, and it's just obscene what they've done, with the price hikes, degraded support, etc.
At this point they're more an enterprise scheme to maximize license profiteering for compatible software and OS "per core" licensing in conjunction with hardware platform providers. It'd be cool if the support were worth the price, but in most enterprise cases, you're going to save a lot of money if you pay enough full time staff to purchase, build, maintain, and operate a virtualization environment compared to what the enterprise platforms provide. In most cases, you'll save more than enough to keep a better specced system completely redundant with spare hardware on hand.
Honestly? VMs are a level of complexity I haven't felt a reason to fuss around with at home for at least the past five years. Just not interested.
I'm told that Kubevirt with Kubernetes has also been a winner among customers post Broadcom acquisition who were really reluctant to go beyond VMware previously.
Proxmox can do containers too and has other benefits like really good ZFS support. I only have a couple of VMs and everything else in containers on my little Proxmox server.
Proxmox can do LXC and has some experimental support for converting Docker based images... that said, it's not the same as Docker/Podman support, which are more feature rich.
I would suggest at least a minimal Linux Server VM if you're running containers, underneath ProxMox or on a bare metal install if you don't need other virtualization on said server.
This is probably not even a rounding error in VMWare, but besides Parallels, what other desktop VM is out there w/ a native GPU driver?
What would it take to see if one can get written for UTM or something like that?
It couldn't possibly making a simple software update cost 21x the previous cost to run the software to the point changing to a competitor is cheaper than maintaining VMware.
I adore Proxmox, I'm not really sure about its support with Windows, but from a Linux server perspective, I love it.
It's fine with windows.
I know a lot of people who worked at VMware through the Broadcom acquisition. Hock Tan sucks.
Even though VMware Fusion (for Mac) is free* and very good, Broadcom is pushing me away to Parallels for silly reasons.
The reason: No matter how I try, even as a registered customer, I can't find a way to download current versions.
When I run VMware Fusion it tells me there's a new version, with bug fixes, support for newer macOS, etc. Would I like to download it? (Months ago it said the URL to check for a new version was broken.). Sure, I click, update please. It takes me to a Broadcom page where I'm supposed to sign in or register, give it my personal and work details, then I can download the new version.
I login because I already have an account. In my account, I can see the older versions of VMware Fusion, including the one I'm already running, but the later two versions aren't showing. Even the minor-version increment from the one I'm using isn't showing. I click around until I find where current ones should be, it shows me files in a table. I click the file and it tells me: Not yet, the account is awaiting verification. Come back in a few days.
It's been stuck like that for months.
But wait! I used this account to get VMWare Fusion a year ago. It still lets me download the version I'm using. The account was already verified! Why does it require new account verification just to get a slightly different, minor-version increment with bug fixes of a free product?
Last time I went through this, I ended up using Homebrew. I had a legit Broadcome/VMware account, had signed the agreement to download the update, but Broadcom's site didn't work. So I was delighted to find it in brew, with vastly better packaging than Broadcom's. Unfortunately the brew package is now disabled.
Before that, I had to sign up with Broadcom a second time, because the first account appeared to lose its access to VMware Fusion. I don't know why. Before that, I had to sign up the first time with Broadcom, even though I already had a VMware account as a paying customer of VMware Fusion.
It's been a great product, which I used to pay for and would again. I've used it for over 10 years. It's free now, and still a great product.
Yet I'm looking at switching to Parallels just because Fusion's "free" download process is too broken to use.
I can't imagine Broadcom is making any money from blocking downloads of the supposedly free product. It was their decision to make it free! It must be disheartening to be a developer on VMware Fusion if you know this is going on.
The worst part about the convoluted download process is that it seems someone have actively been making it more difficult since the first iteration, and I can't for the life of me understand why. Is it being done by someone who hates Broadcom? Or perhaps struggle with mental illness? Or is it due to a mix of micro management and extreme incompetence? I can't remember seeing something this bad since the horror shows people managed to create using stuff like Flash and Silverlight.
Probably just an unfortunate side effect of reusing the same systems used for restricted subscription downloads for free product downloads, combined with underfunding for the free product lines.
I've been able to download free Fusion and Workstation, but my ability to download existing versions of perpetually licensed VMware products was removed the day my (non-renewable) maintenance subscription expired, and they've also paywalled the update servers, again even including older updates I'm entitled to under the perpetual license and my (involuntarily) expired subscription.