I adore Proxmox, I'm not really sure about its support with Windows, but from a Linux server perspective, I love it.
"Negative" views of Broadcom driving VMware migrations, rival says
21–30 of 41 posts
Re: "Negative" views of Broadcom driving VMware migrations, rival says
#22British Hong Kong bank HSBC Holdings plc is the common institutional shareholder pushing for adding friction to self hosting to push customers to the cloud. Avago purchased Broadcom for the same reason. Not private equity, but Chinese-British banks.
Re: "Negative" views of Broadcom driving VMware migrations, rival says
#23PepsiCo 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…
>There's a curve, not unlike the Laffer Curve, that applies to everything you are selling
It's often called the Goldilocks price: not too much, not too little, but just right.
Re: "Negative" views of Broadcom driving VMware migrations, rival says
#24British Hong Kong bank HSBC Holdings plc is the common institutional shareholder pushing for adding friction to self hosting to push customers to the cloud. Avago purchased Broadcom for the same reason. Not private equity, but Chinese-British banks.
This sounds a bit tinfoily but given HSBCs history not impossible; can you show any additional sources to follow?
Re: "Negative" views of Broadcom driving VMware migrations, rival says
#25Even though VMware Fusion (for Mac) is free* and very good, Broadcom is pushing me away to Parallels for silly reasons.
The reason: No matter how I try, even as a registered customer, I can't find a way to download current versions.
When I run VMware Fusion it tells me there's a new version, with bug fixes, support for newer macOS, etc. Would I like to download it? (Months ago it said the URL to check for a new version was broken.). Sure, I click, update please. It takes me to a Broadcom page where I'm supposed to sign in or register, give it my personal and work details, then I can download the new version.
I login because I already have an account. In my account, I can see the older versions of VMware Fusion, including the one I'm already running, but the later two versions aren't showing. Even the minor-version increment from the one I'm using isn't showing. I click around until I find where current ones should be, it shows me files in a table. I click the file and it tells me: Not yet, the account is awaiting verification. Come back in a few days.
It's been stuck like that for months.
But wait! I used this account to get VMWare Fusion a year ago. It still lets me download the version I'm using. The account was already verified! Why does it require new account verification just to get a slightly different, minor-version increment with bug fixes of a free product?
Last time I went through this, I ended up using Homebrew. I had a legit Broadcome/VMware account, had signed the agreement to download the update, but Broadcom's site didn't work. So I was delighted to find it in brew, with vastly better packaging than Broadcom's. Unfortunately the brew package is now disabled.
Before that, I had to sign up with Broadcom a second time, because the first account appeared to lose its access to VMware Fusion. I don't know why. Before that, I had to sign up the first time with Broadcom, even though I already had a VMware account as a paying customer of VMware Fusion.
It's been a great product, which I used to pay for and would again. I've used it for over 10 years. It's free now, and still a great product.
Yet I'm looking at switching to Parallels just because Fusion's "free" download process is too broken to use.
I can't imagine Broadcom is making any money from blocking downloads of the supposedly free product. It was their decision to make it free! It must be disheartening to be a developer on VMware Fusion if you know this is going on.
Re: "Negative" views of Broadcom driving VMware migrations, rival says
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Dying no, but their business certainly had a downward trend on it since so much is moving to containers instead.
Re: "Negative" views of Broadcom driving VMware migrations, rival says
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
VMWare din't have a growth trajectory and didn't have a reasonable expectation of one.
You don't make these kinds of sales when you're circling the drain, you do it when you can see that future coming for you.
Re: "Negative" views of Broadcom driving VMware migrations, rival says
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm kinda hoping AI agents pass the threshold of being able to reliably do a complete production migration sometime this year. We've got a couple years left on the vmware contract, and it's just obscene what they've done, with the price hikes, degraded support, etc.
At this point they're more an enterprise scheme to maximize license profiteering for compatible software and OS "per core" licensing in conjunction with hardware platform providers. It'd be cool if the support were worth the price, but in most enterprise cases, you're going to save a lot of money if you pay enough full time staff to purchase, build, maintain, and operate a virtualization environment compared to what the enterprise platforms provide. In most cases, you'll save more than enough to keep a better specced system completely redundant with spare hardware on hand.
Re: "Negative" views of Broadcom driving VMware migrations, rival says
#29It couldn't possibly making a simple software update cost 21x the previous cost to run the software to the point changing to a competitor is cheaper than maintaining VMware.
Re: "Negative" views of Broadcom driving VMware migrations, rival says
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Just because a company folds doesn't mean they can violate licensing agreements.
It does if that's the law. Every jurisdiction routinely overrules contracts as unenforceable on the basis of some overriding law, so it wouldn't even really be that unusual. Whether it's a good idea or not is another question and one that depends almost entirely on second, third and higher order effects.
There probably is a world where all software is libre software and we still see similar rates of development, but it's not at all clear how you could get there. Especially not if you cared about the damage caused by upending the business models of a significant fraction of the world economy.