Broadcom loses another big VMware customer

I have to wonder if stuff like this will, over time, force companies to be extremely wary of any tech that eventually falls into the "extremely difficult to remove" category, and have companies instead requiring open source solutions and then separate contracts with support companies for those solutions.

It's just further re-emphasizing that it doesn't matter how good your vendor is now, they will probably eventually get acquired by a company attempting to squeeze every last penny out of you. And their cost-benefit calculation is no longer based on how much unique value the software is providing, but it's instead about how much of a PITA it is to migrate off said software.

Umm. The contingency plan for any big corp is to continually plan to migrate off a legacy system. It takes forever for big corp, if they don’t have a contingency plan now they will never have it. He wants to drop a bunch of run books on people and tell them go do that. He only wants configuration and does not want any development.

Dating back 10-15 years, that premise was exactly what drove the enterprise shift away from a Microsoft stack (.Net + SQL Server + Windows Server) to a LAMP stack (where the L-A-M-P were each substitutable by various OSS options). It required a lot of reskilling in the enterprise, but after everyone was up to speed on the fundamentals of the new architectures and comfortable programming in Java/Python/Javascript/PHP it made learning all the newer things to come even easier. It also set the stage for companies like Canonical and Redhat to create viable commercial businesses wrapping FOSS software in enterprise support.

Where we are now is on the cusp of starting another of these lock-in rejection cycles, but where the lock-in isn't at the OS or devtools layers, but at the data/analytics layer and with IaaS or PaaS having become unreasonably expensive alternatives to on-prem data centers [for many enterprises].

It'll be interesting to see how things evolve for Snowflake & Databricks (as well as Pega, C3AI, and similar), and whether CIOs start placing bets on their own team creating their own solutions using FOSS tooling on-prem, leaving public cloud as the domain of things like ERP & whatever SaaS business software they license.

Did you respond to the wrong comment or something? I have no idea who "he" is in your comment.

Sorry I meant the CEO and non technical types. They want to buy software and configure it so they can easily switch vendors.

You just described vendor lock-in. It's never fun, but it's usually a known factor for any competent decision-makers. Sometimes "good for now" is good enough...