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146 points belter | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.215s | source
1. jmull ◴[] No.42309298[source]
My $dayjob is freaking out about the new cost of VMware.

I suspect Broadcom's plan is to figure out just how much they can bear and cut a deal along those lines.

That would totally work -- we're neck deep in vmware, and there's no easy way out -- except that there's a kind of network effect at play.

Support is huge for us. In the beginning, we developed expertise in vmware (particularly in regard to our products), and guided our customers to it as well. Customers were happy to follow our recommended/supported option, and we were happy supporting it. (The support ain't cheap!)

But our customers, by-and-large, are smaller and somewhat more nimble, meaning many will be unable or unwilling to do a deal with broadcom, and will insist on switching away. I suspect new customers will lead the way... there's no way we're going to walk away from a deal because the customer refuses to pay for vmware, and we probably can't afford to eat that cost for them. So we're going to start gaining expertise and supporting other vm platforms. I think we'll follow our original pattern: settle on one, gain expertise, start using it in support, then test and dev, and steer our customers to it. At some point we'll realize we know how to get rid of the rest of our internal use of vmware, AND realize we can sell remaining customers support to switch away from vmware themselves. Once that happens, I think it becomes a ball rolling down hill, and things will accelerate quickly.

There are a couple reasons this isn't like Oracle, BTW. For one, with Oracle we're 10,000 ft below the surface with Oracle-provided air tanks. Second (I guess this is the main thing), Oracle is our problem, not our customers'.