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

I was running about 1000 machines on VMware in my previous career. It was always a love/hate relationship with them. We were able to achieve a lot of our goals using VMware and it was hard not to be ecstatic about the results. At the same time, they were always a nightmare to deal with, the software was buggy and support wasn't great.

I always dreaded renewal time because it was normal for them to use it as an opportunity to extort us. Microsoft was a breeze in comparison. It's funny because Microsoft always had such a horrible reputation. I don't know if I was just so abused by VMware or what, but Microsoft was just easy. We had an annual true-up date and we always knew where we stood with them. We reported our numbers and that was it. No surprises ever and there was never an issue if we didn't report any growth. VMware was always pulling some kind of shit and was absolutely determined to push us over budget every time.

"their documentation was either vague or out of date. Half the time, I felt like I was cobbling fixes together from obscure forum posts rather than relying on official support"

Jeez! You just summarised my last decade working with software! Most kinds.

It wasn't this hard around the 2000's. Likely my age is a contributing factor, but experience should counteract that. But no. Software seems to go self serving more and more. Self serving the needs of the organization making the software. "Allowing" (more like delegating) users to help each other rather than robust support mostly through up to date and good documentation, in parallel of releasing unintuitive solutions so more training ours could be billed is something making every workin day a misery. Big part of the days are spent on satisfying the needs of the software (trying to figure out what now, mostly from random and outdated and tangentially relevant forum messages), rather than working the other way around.