Broadcom loses another big VMware customer

10x price increase? Sounds like a classic Computer Associates move. I think when Broadcom bought CA they also acquired this aspect of CA’s culture, and are now applying it to products which never had anything to do with CA.

Hock Tan runs it like a hedge fund. He will squeeze these products until they are dry and move on.

If you see an enterprise software product starting to decline, as VMWare has in the cloud era, then sometimes the "best" (but evil) thing to do is just milk your customers as hard as you can. Just squeeze every penny out of people who are stuck with you. Any migration of a large enterprise will take several years so you can just get all that money in one big go and then shoot the product in the head.

If you see a tenant starting to complain, like that one who’s been in your building for years, then sometimes the "best" (but evil) thing to do is just milk 'em for all they’re worth. You jack up the rent—ten times what they’re paying now. They ain't got no choice. Ain’t no place for them to go, so you just squeeze every penny outta ‘em. It’ll take ‘em years to find a new spot, so you got plenty of time to take all that cash in one big lump. And once you’ve wrung ‘em dry, you just tell 'em, 'Thanks for your business,' and throw 'em out. Nothing personal, kid. Just how the game’s played.

What I've been hearing from others is that Broadcom wants to extract the most money possible from their top 10% of customers and shed the rest.

That said, even AT&T is jumping ship: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/10/broad...

To think that the migration away from VMWare would cost $40-50m but have a "very quick payback" presumably means that AT&T is a gigantic customer paying a ton of money, so if they're not in the top 10% contracts worth keeping then who is?

What you're describing is more like private equity, not a hedge fund. Hedge funds are generally passive investors and don't usually drive product pricing in their portfolio companies.

Looks similar to what was Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. They even said McDonnell bought Boeing with Boeing's money. Looks like CA bought Broadcom with Broadcom's money

I lost track of CA after the whole Clipper acquisition, and trying to make a VB alternative out of its Windows version.

Bad news, AT&T settled. They knew they could extort Broadcom back by going public to get their discount.

https://www.ciodive.com/news/broadcom-att-vmware-settlement-...

Not everyone wants to go the court way to force a discount - lots of places are furiously looking at minimizing the time spent paying the hiked up prices.

this just makes me wonder if there could be a good way to publicly track tendency towards such malignancy.

reputation tracking for the mostly anonymous relationships we have with businesses these days can be difficult.

In the mid-2000s I worked for a place where we were paying exorbitant annual license fees for this CA eTrust LDAP we hardly used. We mainly used Novell eDir and Sun JES LDAP, we were so happy when we could migrate the eTrust to Sun. Later on, Sun JES got replaced by Oracle Internet Directory, and Novell eDir got replaced by AD.

Say what you like about Sun or Oracle or Novell, their pricing was much more reasonable than CA’s. Plus we were a public university, and CA didn’t seem to believe in education discounts, whereas Oracle gave us a standard education discount of over 90% off list price.

CA was famously the place where mainframe software went to die. When I worked for Oracle, I had some very limited exposure to CA TopSecret and ACF2, which are mainframe security products (RACF competitors) that CA bought, which an Oracle product I was working on integrated with. No idea what the licensing was but I’m sure it wasn’t cheap.

It would not surprise me if AT&T was playing with alternatives and just decided to pay up for a couple years while they learn more and figure out how to migrate. It is likely that the alternatives - with the influx of customers dropping vmware - get enough better in a couple years that vmware is much better.

"Person tries to parody landlords to make them seem almost cartoonishly evil, but seems out of touch because they are just describing everyday landlords and things happening all around".

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=rent+uk+news&iar=news&ia=ne...

"My landlord's 34% rent rise felt like an eviction" - BBC on MSN.com|6 days ago

"UK households who rent face £200 being added to payments" - Birmingham Mail on MSN.com|12 days ago

"Rents now 'unaffordable' across most of the UK" - PropertyWire|5 days ago - "Monthly rents have been labelled 'unaffordable' in every region of the UK except for the North East, data from analytics company TwentyCi has revealed. The ONS [Office of National Statistics] defines a rental property as affordable if the median rent is 30% or less of the median income of private renting households."

"UK Cities See Rents Surge More Than 40% in Four Years" - Financial News|7 days ago

"Revealed - where rent has risen over 30% in the past year" - lettingagenttoday.co.uk|7 days ago - "The figures show that, across Britain, the average monthly cost of renting has increased by 8.7% over the last 12 months"

"UK tenants hit by highest inflation in September" - The Financial Times|5 days ago