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VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

(www.theregister.com)
245 points rntn | 2 comments | 08 Sep 25 12:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.663s | source
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wkat4242 ◴[08 Sep 25 12:42 UTC] No.45167565[source]▶
The bigger issue is, if you're refusing to honour a contract as a vendor, not only do you risk a lawsuit like this one. But more importantly, who is ever going to sign up for another contract with you? You just proved it isn't worth the paper it's written on.

Unwritten terms like "valid until I decide to tear it up haha lol" are not generally appreciated by companies that depend on your stuff for their business. Of course you can extort your existing customers until they manage to move away but basically in the longer term you're suiciding your entire business.

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stackskipton ◴[08 Sep 25 13:08 UTC] No.45167794[source]▶
Ops person here, VMware is so embedded at these companies that switching away would be like Google saying, no more gRPC, everything is now SOAP. The amount of impacts is just too mind boggling to even consider.

2 companies ago was heavily invested in VMware. It impacted monitoring, backups, deployments, networking, cloud migration and more. I can only shudder at level of effort they might be going through to get off VMware.

Because of that, they probably won’t for years even as Broadcom screws them over.

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1. bluGill ◴[08 Sep 25 13:43 UTC] No.45168172[source]▶
Switching away today is too mind boggling to consider, but switching is purely a technical problem. We can put a price on the costs, and the time. VMWare was founded in 1998 - that means 27 year ago nobody was using it, and in turn we can say took you less than 27 years to get dependent on and - surely you can switch to something else in 27 years. More likely you can switch in 2 years - that is about what it took one company I know of.
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2. stackskipton ◴[08 Sep 25 14:31 UTC] No.45168798[source]▶
Sure but old company cut Ops team to the bone, which is why I don’t work there anymore. So CTO is faced with, pay VMware or cut back on deployments so Ops team can have some breathing room to work on migration to whatever they pick.