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?

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.

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.