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

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.

This.

I had to tell CurrentCo that I cannot reinstall their vSphere deployment at a client site because they bought a perpetual license, didn’t migrate it to Broadcom before they cut it off, and now we cannot simply go get the latest patch or appliance for that version number without inviting an audit and a sueball from Broadcom.

“Good thing Microsoft would never do that to us.”

Ha. Hahaha.

At least VMware isn't user-facing and it can be removed without riots. Imagine trying to tell someone they don't need Excel. I try to maintain at least plausible flexibility to go tell vendors to shove it, but if you have some enthusiastic fans of Microsoft Teams (they exist, who knew?)... Teams is one of those things that is inescapably tied to an incredibly deep well of platform lock-in.

Really? Teams?? We went teams abd microsoft ecosystem fully because we needed extra windows management stuff as we have grown and users had software that required windows and excel and the biggest pain point has been teams. As near as i can tell it tries to do everythibg wrong and the things that are so blindingly obvious that it can't do them wrong, it finds a way to do them suboptimally

I would never invent a lie as implausible as this. Yes, there are fans of Microsoft Teams. They're out there and they make decisions.

I... I like Teams...

So, in the spirit of intellectual curiousity, and I will avoid making any judgements in any of my responses, I have 5 questions:

1) Have you ever been exposed to alternative communicators?

2) What features do you enjoy about teams

3) What platform are you using it from (Windows Desktop / Laptop? What spec)

4) Have you ever written a bot or integration?

5) Can you take me through a very brief working day for you, with a focus on collaborating with others.. (file sharing, online chats, IRL chats, meetings?)

Teams is fine, especially as others are so expensive for small non-US shops

We already have to bite the bullet and pay for office, at least we get free chat

I wish Teams integrated better with Github Issues/PR, but it works well as a company-wide chat

No, Teams is not fine.

If cost is your concern: SaaS Zulip is free.

I thought it was “intellectual curiosity” but it turns out it was a segway into insisting with your own preferences and eventually when being contradicted by others with their own needs and preferences, becoming plain insulting. Will leave your words here for reference:

> I think ignorance is bliss and you should avoid knowing about anything that could be better. Your mind might do this for you (rejection) but best not to tempt fate.

There’s nothing intellectual about fake curiosity, passive aggressive remarks, or insistently pushing your opinion just for the sake of sounding smarter than the next guy.

I was curious about why someone would have a preference, what does Teams serve that alternatives do not.

But you blanket claimed its fine, its not fine.

I won’t work in a company that forces me to use Teams- its a good proxy for how they think about internal communications and how they feel about staff.

You can claim what you want, I was curious, but don’t come in here telling people its ok to use teams- we’ve established that his options were fucking WebEx- which is also not fine.

> you blanket claimed its fine

You’re talking to different people and didn’t even care. This is not fine.

> which is also not fine

You act like your word is law. Which is also not fine. You shouldn’t need someone on the internet reminding you of this.