Wouldn't a slow boil have been better than a massive price hike? Raising the price by 50% would be palatable to most medium to large orgs as the cost to switch is greater. And it would still net a nice chunk of change for Broadcom.
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Cloud is staggeringly expensive compared to your own physical servers. Has been for all but trivial (almost toy) workloads since day 1. And that's before you pay for bandwidth.
I was spending a decent chunk of change monthly on cloud boxes just for my personal hosting projects, and eventually realized I could get a stonking 1U box, colo at a local data center, pay for the server in the savings in a year or two, and have radically more capability in the deal.
If you need a "droplet" type VM, with a gig of RAM, a couple gig of disk, and bandwidth, they're not bad. DigitalOcean works well for that, and is way cheaper on bandwidth than other places (1TB per droplet per month, combined pool). So I'll use that for basic proxy nodes and such.
But if you start wanting lots of RAM (I run, among other things, a Matrix homeserver, and some game servers for friends, so RAM use goes up in a hurry), or disk measured in TB, cloud costs start to go vertical, in a hurry. It's really nice having a box with enough RAM I can just toss RAM at VMs, do offsite backup of "everything," etc.
If you're spending more than a few hundred a month on cloud hosting, it's worth evaluating what a physical box would save you.
//EDIT: By "go vertical," I mean "To get a cloud box with similar specs to what I racked up would be half the cost of the entire 1U, per month."
Cloud is really expensive, but so is doing it yourself. Plus there is a plethora of regulations coming this way, NIS2, CRA and so on. If a software is down, it means a lot of lost revenue or extra cost.
If you just need pure compute or bandwidth, there no point in going to the cloud.
How much time was wasted by customer on-premise JIRA not sending emails. It was always... a didn't get email for a long time. Ask them to check it and restart it. Or my recent Win2012 (no R2) end of support and migration. At least the customer does pay for the Extended Security Updates.
And "the cloud" is not a magical wand for reliability, either. How many times a year does one of AWS's regions being down (or something with CloudFlare being down) front page HN, because a substantial swath of the internet has stopped working?
I'm not saying cloud is never the right answer. However, I do think that anymore, it's such the "default option" that very few people even consider the possibility of hosting their own hardware somewhere. I'm pretty sure I was the first random individual to come talk to my colo in years, because it sure looks like they spun up a "shared rack" for me.