PepsiCo had been raising the prices on their snacks, including Doritos, far faster than their costs or the rate of inflation.
They "suddenly" realized that many less people were willing to pay $7 for a bag of Doritos and that they had priced their product higher than they should have.
There's a curve, not unlike the Laffer Curve, that applies to everything you are selling; something that Broadcom is learning (though their stock has had crazy high appreciation over the last number of years!)
I don't think we really need those quotes. Broadcom bought an existing, successful company, and immediately skyrocketed the price of their most used commercial offering.
You don't need a degree in business to surmise that short term profits will also skyrocket but you will eventually lose the market.
Private equity... or Broadcom... bleed dying things dry. It's arbitrage on companies that are too slow to adopt new technology. Instead of watching something die slowly squeeze it for everything it's got by making the inflexible companies pay for their inability to change.
The end of a dead product is the same, but the financial reaper is betting they can make more money killing something quickly.
No, but Broadcom didn't buy them to build a company over time. They have a long pattern of buying a tech company, jacking up the prices, and making enough money (before customers switch) to more than make up for the purchase price of the company, netting them a tidy profit. Plus, at the end what they're left with isn't completely value-less either.
Everyone who followed Broadcom (and that included many VMWare employees) knew exactly what was coming the moment the acquisition was announced.
Totally impossible. Closed source software often contains IP licensed from other entities. Just because a company folds doesn't mean they can violate licensing agreements.
The biggest blocker there is probably whatever remaining creditors to the company when it goes under then have claims on remaining assets like the software.
One solution would be putting something in the tax code such that donating the code to an open source foundation gives a bigger benefit than simply writing it off as a total loss and destroying it.
Yup, or that bad view of Broadcom is because of the price hikes.
I had a meeting with IT where I was worried they were finally coming after my proxmox box they "didn't know about". Turns out they saw their vmware bill and suddenly had questions.
It's worth it. The increased participation and discussion have given a little momentum in usability, and AI on hand makes the learning curve very manageable. If you're already familiar with vmware, virtualization in general, it's a pretty easy transition.
I switched from VMWare to Proxmox a few years ago because Proxmox supported a wider range of network cards that were more common in the cheap desktop computers I use in my homelab, whilst VMWare almost required an Intel network card (which was usually fine for server hardware).
It was a surprisingly easy transition that I have not regretted one bit. I'm not sure whether there that was an actual migration path, without reinstalling servers from scratch. Homelab meant it didn't quite have the requirements of a production system...
Honestly? VMs are a level of complexity I haven't felt a reason to fuss around with at home for at least the past five years. Just not interested.
I'm told that Kubevirt with Kubernetes has also been a winner among customers post Broadcom acquisition who were really reluctant to go beyond VMware previously.
Proxmox can do containers too and has other benefits like really good ZFS support. I only have a couple of VMs and everything else in containers on my little Proxmox server.
Proxmox can do LXC and has some experimental support for converting Docker based images... that said, it's not the same as Docker/Podman support, which are more feature rich.
I would suggest at least a minimal Linux Server VM if you're running containers, underneath ProxMox or on a bare metal install if you don't need other virtualization on said server.
PepsiCo had been raising the prices on their snacks, including Doritos, far faster than their costs or the rate of inflation.
They "suddenly" realized that many less people were willing to pay $7 for a bag of Doritos and that they had priced their product higher than they should have.
There's a curve, not unlike the Laffer Curve, that applies to everything you are selling; something that Broadcom is learning (though their stock has had crazy high appreciation over the last number of years!)
This is probably not even a rounding error in VMWare, but besides Parallels, what other desktop VM is out there w/ a native GPU driver?
What would it take to see if one can get written for UTM or something like that?
I don't think we really need those quotes. Broadcom bought an existing, successful company, and immediately skyrocketed the price of their most used commercial offering.
You don't need a degree in business to surmise that short term profits will also skyrocket but you will eventually lose the market.
Private equity... or Broadcom... bleed dying things dry. It's arbitrage on companies that are too slow to adopt new technology. Instead of watching something die slowly squeeze it for everything it's got by making the inflexible companies pay for their inability to change.
The end of a dead product is the same, but the financial reaper is betting they can make more money killing something quickly.
Was VMWare dying prior to the acquisition? I don't really know the financials but that wasn't the impression I had.
No, but Broadcom didn't buy them to build a company over time. They have a long pattern of buying a tech company, jacking up the prices, and making enough money (before customers switch) to more than make up for the purchase price of the company, netting them a tidy profit. Plus, at the end what they're left with isn't completely value-less either.
Everyone who followed Broadcom (and that included many VMWare employees) knew exactly what was coming the moment the acquisition was announced.
Should be a rule that when this happens and these companies fold that everything is open sourced - at least we'd all get something out of it.
Totally impossible. Closed source software often contains IP licensed from other entities. Just because a company folds doesn't mean they can violate licensing agreements.
The biggest blocker there is probably whatever remaining creditors to the company when it goes under then have claims on remaining assets like the software.
One solution would be putting something in the tax code such that donating the code to an open source foundation gives a bigger benefit than simply writing it off as a total loss and destroying it.
Yup, or that bad view of Broadcom is because of the price hikes.
I had a meeting with IT where I was worried they were finally coming after my proxmox box they "didn't know about". Turns out they saw their vmware bill and suddenly had questions.
I stopped using VMware because they stopped supporting newer Linux kernels.
Lack of maintenance => lack of users.
> Other companies, including Microsoft (Hyper-V) and Proxmox, have also been aggressively courting disgruntled VMware customers.
I think I'm among the few in my peer group who hasn't yet started running Proxmox on their home server.
It's worth it. The increased participation and discussion have given a little momentum in usability, and AI on hand makes the learning curve very manageable. If you're already familiar with vmware, virtualization in general, it's a pretty easy transition.
Highly recommended.
Agreed!
I switched from VMWare to Proxmox a few years ago because Proxmox supported a wider range of network cards that were more common in the cheap desktop computers I use in my homelab, whilst VMWare almost required an Intel network card (which was usually fine for server hardware).
It was a surprisingly easy transition that I have not regretted one bit. I'm not sure whether there that was an actual migration path, without reinstalling servers from scratch. Homelab meant it didn't quite have the requirements of a production system...
Honestly? VMs are a level of complexity I haven't felt a reason to fuss around with at home for at least the past five years. Just not interested.
I'm told that Kubevirt with Kubernetes has also been a winner among customers post Broadcom acquisition who were really reluctant to go beyond VMware previously.
Proxmox can do containers too and has other benefits like really good ZFS support. I only have a couple of VMs and everything else in containers on my little Proxmox server.
Proxmox can do LXC and has some experimental support for converting Docker based images... that said, it's not the same as Docker/Podman support, which are more feature rich.
I would suggest at least a minimal Linux Server VM if you're running containers, underneath ProxMox or on a bare metal install if you don't need other virtualization on said server.
I know a lot of people who worked at VMware through the Broadcom acquisition. Hock Tan sucks.