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

The state of software companies is pretty terrible. I have been on the acquisition side as well as the development / end-user side and it’s mind-boggling knowing the exorbitant costs with bare minimum value delivered, yet companies just keep paying whatever they’re told it costs, until it’s comically astronomical and the customers have to tell them to get bent. Yet still, software vendors keep changing their licensing structure until it meets that comically astronomical figure and pushing customers away.

Enterprise software licensing, support contracts, and technical account managers (TAMs) often run into hundreds of thousands or millions annually per organization. Yet, in practice, support tickets go unresolved or ignored, even for large clients.

The software quality of our most expensive products is extremely poor and unreliable, almost across the board. Many products suffer from bugs, outdated features, or incompatibility issues that disrupt operations. In development roles, this means wasted time on workarounds, custom patches, or integrations that shouldn't be necessary. For a non-small organization, this scales up to significant productivity losses and hidden costs in overhead.

These companies actively alienate us, the customer, through their business practices. Changes like aggressive licensing shifts (e.g., moving from per-core to per-employee models) force reevaluations and migrations and eroding trust (i.e. Oracle with Java, VMWare fiasco). This isn't isolated—it's a pattern where short-term revenue grabs risk long-term relationships, yet companies seem unfazed.

This jacks the entire ecosystem up. These practices stifle innovation by locking customers into suboptimal tools, increase overall IT spend industry-wide, and contribute to employee burnout in dev and ops teams.

It seems like it’s a race to the bottom. The strategy is to create an ecosystem with high switching costs and vendor lock-in. It just doesn’t seem sustainable, yet- it keeps truckin’ along.

Software, done right, is both extremely hard and expensive. Hardware was cheapened by China/Asia but it is not happening for software (theirs generally sucks and they lack many fundamentals). Europe completely lost the race.

The current breed of managers in the US have decided to fire developers, abuse customers (you have nowhere to go) and burn all the money on AI (they believe it’ll solve all their problems).

Morale will remain low until an alternative spawns. Kinda with electric cars. Europeans, Japanese and Koreans are now forced to up their game and lower their prices.

You're just saying things you want to be true, "Asian software" doesn't suck and Europe didn't lose.

Just because "all" software companies have American entities doesn't mean you "won", that's just what happens when a jurisdiction let's companies do anything even if it's detrimental to society as a whole.

Most (all?) of the tech stack depends on American companies starting from Operating Systems, to Servers, to SaaS, to Cloud, to Software running on most businesses, etc. What you are saying is meaningless when they got you by the ba&&s.

Yes American companies have been good at capitalizing on IT and a lot of companies are "by the balls" of Microsoft, but much infra is opensource. Linux runs the world.

Linus moved to the US two decades ago, so it's been quite a while since Linux could be considered "European".

I think it should be considered what it is, global with profits centered in the US.

Certainly, the are a fair number of contributors in Europe and both SUSE and Canonical are European based. I still think it's hard not to think of Linux as fairly US-centric however if only because of how many large US companies use (and contribute to) Linux.