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

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

If you need 40,000 servers to keep your business running (which you don't, your ~3-8 million weekly transactions can be processed on 1 computer, but whatever), hire people that will work on you, and whose paycheck depends on keeping those computers working, to keep those computers working.

Game theory arguments like "they wouldn't screw me over because other people won't want to do business with them" don't work when the other party is trying to maximize quarterly earnings, and their long-term thinking is in the order of ~2 years.

Numbers I found vary but Tesco has around 3500 stores in the UK alone alongside other chains they have a hand in. They also have a large online presence, click and collect operations, estates, data collection schemes and a whole logistics network to operate. I'd have actually thought it would be higher than ~11 VMs per store.

That works out to ~11 computers/licenses per store, which sounds a tad high but also very easy to do if you let new system accrete over time and factor in the need for offline operations and redundancy across regions.