“Pay 50k$ within a week or we’ll delete your data”. Ransomware gangs are even friendlier than this.
A large software company raised our license costs from $80.000/y to $800.000 one-time payment and threatened to essentially shutdown our company. If you have no plan-B for your essentially technology, it's on you.
VMware? At least everybody saw that coming the second the Broadcom merger was announced.