> Cant wait to watch VMware die a slow death

Their strategy is to go after a few of the biggest organizations, and not a bunch of small mom-and-pop shops. Just like IBM with mainframes, which still seems to be profitable for them.

IBM play works because they have 60 years of legacy and path dependent development. You can't simply turn into IBM. And that strategy also made sure that IBM was the one delivering hardware to hypergrowth companies like google and friends. And it made IBM itself not into a large cloud company either.

There are people who have put their blood, sweat and tears into it. Never a good thing when something dies.

Is there that much negativity towards VMWare? I got the impression they were generally liked by users? Still enterprise software, but good stuff, and not awful about their licencing like some other companies?

Not really. On the smaller scale there was no reason outside of familiarity to run VMware over hyper-v.

This will be a shift for on-prem deployments. For cloud solutions running VMware in AWS/Azure, unless those renewals go up significantly, most of VMwares mrr is already locked in and the people running these setups generally refuse to learn how the cloud works so it’s a pure lift and shift mentality.

But the pattern begins, broadcom buys VMware does nothing increase prices. Why would any sane client stay around to get VC squeezed.

On prem deployments at my sites swapping to hyper v prior to renewal with VMware. We saw the writing on the wall after what broadcom did to us when they bought Symantec.

The software always was fairly horrible behind the scenes, albeit with a nice user interface. However I've spent years and years dealing with the sheer awfulness which is VDDK (https://libguestfs.org/nbdkit-vddk-plugin.1.html) which leaves a bitter taste.

Until they were acquired by BRCM. Then oh well, you know, typical BRCM behaviors awaits.

Yeah I've heard horror stories about them. It was the VMWare bit specifically that surprised me though!