>Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.

I know plenty of Enterprise customers who cannot move easily and just renewed 3 year VMware licenses for their cluster at insane rates. They are planning on moving but I'd be shocked if they complete it. $LastCompany had VMware footprint I know will be very difficult to move off, deployments, monitoring, backups were all dependent on VMware. There are plenty of US Government entities who are not even considering it at this time.

Also, Broadcom has slashed expenses so I wouldn't be shocked if profit margins are crazy. This article: https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/03/07/bulk-of-big-... indicates over 1 Billion additional revenue per quarter

If you look deeper into the migration article, it's pointed out that they are already facing migration challenges. I wouldn't be shocked if 3 years later, there are some workloads still running on VMware, you can't easily get them off and just renews insane licensing cost for much smaller hardware footprint.

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sokoloff 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The extortionate renewal rates I saw as a gift from Broadcom. It made it very easy to price the risk of doing nothing and be sure that the cost of outages during and immediately post-migration would be lower. (Yes, we had a few, due to obscure drivers issues or an app that really wanted a specific CPU or chipset or virtual NIC, and they cost us less than 10%, probably closer to 5%, of what the proposed renewal would have cost.)

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jamesfinlayson 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah I'm at a place that is kind of sucking it up, but there is a work-stream to move more stuff into the cloud and another work-stream to move more stuff on-prem but Kubernetes running on bare-metal. There's also work to stop using some component of VMware as well.

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stackskipton 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure but whole strategy is "Jack up prices by 500%, cut expenses by 70% and make more money in short term"

What about the long term? Who care, massive money made and they can use that to keep going.

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sidewndr46 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Long term you roll those profits into another acquisition. Rinse and repeat. Scorched earth, no mercy

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twoodfin 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think Broadcom correctly realizes that no matter what they do there is no long term: In a world of Cloud hyperscalers and containerization, the absolute number of “traditional” virtual machines run by a commercial hypervisor has nowhere to go but down.

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rwmj 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No one's going away from VMs any time soon (if ever). More than half of the workloads we see being migrated are Windows. Many more are odd/ancient RHEL versions running some very specific software where the manufacturer won't offer a newer version / went out of business / the guy who set it up left and no one knows how it's configured / it works and we never want to touch it again.

	▲	twoodfin 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		IBM’s mainframe business is also large and highly profitable. It’s not growing in any meaningful way relative to other technology businesses.

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bigstrat2003 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Containers do not reduce reliance on VMs, really. Those containers still need a server to run on, and that server is almost certainly going to be a VM and not bare metal.

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nix0n 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> that server is almost certainly going to be a VM and not bare metal

I understand that this is normal but I've never understood it.

If all the containers are running the same company's applications (so they don't care about security boundaries between them), what's the difference between having all the containers under the same kernel vs separate kernels?

	▲	donavanm 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The VM layer gives you an aspect of fungibility that commodity hardware doesn’t. It’s being able to over provision, dynamically reallocate hardware resources, or do things like live migration and entire system snapshots. That hardware/system management aspect is what VM’s give you and containers don’t. Note: if you want to conflate “containers“ with an entire job management and scheduling system (“k8s”) then you’re not actually talking about the current target customer for VMware.
	▲	wmf 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's cargo culting. Even 37 Signals fell for it.

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5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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twoodfin 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, but at that level it’s totally commoditized by the hyperscalers. VMWare brings nothing to the table.

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lokar 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They explained that fairly clearly

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Spooky23 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They make AI crap. The future is Mars.

	▲	BLKNSLVR 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But Snickers is Mars with nuts, so it's both healthier and more filling. The future is Snickers!