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

(www.theregister.com)
245 points rntn | 5 comments | 08 Sep 25 12:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | 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. henry700 ◴[08 Sep 25 14:26 UTC] No.45168728[source]▶
AI-assisted migration of glue boilerplate code transforms this mind-boggling amount of impact into a two-year project, max.
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2. LegionMammal978 ◴[08 Sep 25 14:55 UTC] No.45169118[source]▶
Only to the extent that the team is competent enough to properly test all that boilerplate code, which is very far from a given. A relative of mine in IT has had a large internal-tooling migration get dragged on for years by the persistently bug-ridden code of one of the groups working on it.
3. mlinhares ◴[08 Sep 25 15:33 UTC] No.45169595[source]▶
These days it is really hard to figure out if comments like these are real or satire.
4. johncolanduoni ◴[08 Sep 25 15:46 UTC] No.45169758[source]▶
The AI can’t migrate the knowledge of all the people that have to operate your on-prem VM deployments.
5. bityard ◴[08 Sep 25 16:40 UTC] No.45170481[source]▶
What code? An on-prem VMWare deployment is all about hardware, storage, networking, and fuck-tons of planning, budgeting, and approvals. There is little to no customer-written code in a typical VMWare farm, except maybe some Ansible or whatever for minor customizations and automation.