As an old ex-vmware eng it's kinda sad reading all these articles about broadcom's controlled descent into terrain. A lot of really cool and useful engineering was done in vmware's heyday, and it was often delivered in rather shaky commercial shapes, but for a while the whole thing kinda worked. And broadcom seems to see it as a company that is long past its ability to innovate, extracting as many dollars as possible…
I agree with your point about "winning was the default state." I joined during the Diane Greene era and left in the Pat Gelsinger era, spoke to all three CEOs at different points in one-on-ones, and learned a lot about how different people approach the challenges of running a company and listening to employees.
Pre-Broadcom, sort of toward the end of my time there, there was a lot of unintended self-sabotage that didn't need to happen. We lost people that we shouldn't and shot ourselves in the foot for some really dumb reasons, which just a bit more coordination could have prevented. There were some innovative ideas that got lost in all this, and I believe could have fueled VMware's product line and put it in the right positions for where the sector ultimately went. Alas.