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

(www.theregister.com)
245 points rntn | 3 comments | 08 Sep 25 12:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.239s | source
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b3lvedere ◴[08 Sep 25 14:09 UTC] No.45168494[source]▶
Perpetual licenses are eventually very bad for business if nobody pays for support. Nobody pays for support if they remotely think they will not need it. Shit starts hitting the fan when you actually need excellent support and get a (huge) invoice.

People would care a lot less if Broadcom had very gradually increase prices over 5 years or a decade, stopped support on version 7, stopped development on version 8 and gradually changed everything starting with version 9, but they decided in all their wisdom they wanted their investment back ASAP instead of waiting.

Maybe they should have looked at the licensing and support models Veeam uses.

replies(1): >>45173955 #
1. kjs3 ◴[08 Sep 25 21:03 UTC] No.45173955[source]▶
Nobody pays for support if they remotely think they will not need it.

Maybe in your experience. Virtually every company I've worked for or with in the last 2-3 decades (mostly enterprise shops to be fair) paid for support on critial infrastructure like VMware. Most of them are required to by various contract or regulatory requirement (like the Very Large Financial I'm at now). The tiny number of shops I worked with that blew off support were 1) SMB, and 2) run by idiots. YMMV.

replies(1): >>45179389 #
2. b3lvedere ◴[09 Sep 25 08:56 UTC] No.45179389[source]▶
Agree. It's my experience and most of those are small businesses.
replies(1): >>45179728 #
3. mixermachine ◴[09 Sep 25 09:39 UTC] No.45179728[source]▶
As soon any certification is required for the business the chapter SLA (service level agreements) comes up. Basically every business that is medium to large has to pass some kind of certification. Most of them will pay for an annual support contract because the SLA chapter forces them to have some kind of measure to recover from architecture problems.