I always dreaded renewal time because it was normal for them to use it as an opportunity to extort us. Microsoft was a breeze in comparison. It's funny because Microsoft always had such a horrible reputation. I don't know if I was just so abused by VMware or what, but Microsoft was just easy. We had an annual true-up date and we always knew where we stood with them. We reported our numbers and that was it. No surprises ever and there was never an issue if we didn't report any growth. VMware was always pulling some kind of shit and was absolutely determined to push us over budget every time.

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.

Enterprise software licensing, support contracts, and technical account managers (TAMs) often run into hundreds of thousands or millions annually per organization. Yet, in practice, support tickets go unresolved or ignored, even for large clients.

The software quality of our most expensive products is extremely poor and unreliable, almost across the board. Many products suffer from bugs, outdated features, or incompatibility issues that disrupt operations. In development roles, this means wasted time on workarounds, custom patches, or integrations that shouldn't be necessary. For a non-small organization, this scales up to significant productivity losses and hidden costs in overhead.

These companies actively alienate us, the customer, through their business practices. Changes like aggressive licensing shifts (e.g., moving from per-core to per-employee models) force reevaluations and migrations and eroding trust (i.e. Oracle with Java, VMWare fiasco). This isn't isolated—it's a pattern where short-term revenue grabs risk long-term relationships, yet companies seem unfazed.

This jacks the entire ecosystem up. These practices stifle innovation by locking customers into suboptimal tools, increase overall IT spend industry-wide, and contribute to employee burnout in dev and ops teams.

It seems like it’s a race to the bottom. The strategy is to create an ecosystem with high switching costs and vendor lock-in. It just doesn’t seem sustainable, yet- it keeps truckin’ along.

My favorite thing about leaving that job was never having to deal with VMWare ever again.

> Many mid-market and regional operators view the new [subscription] structure as untenable and are actively exploring alternatives.. Nutanix emerged early as the leading competitive alternative to VMware.. over 2,700 new customers.. driven by organizations fleeing VMware's new pricing model.. [including] more than 50 Global 2000 companies, representing major enterprises willing to undertake complex, multi-year infrastructure overhauls.. With VMware serving approximately 200,000 customers globally, Nutanix sees most of the migration opportunity still ahead.

They extract as much cash out of the decaying corpse as they can, and then discard it.

They were actually fairly open about this to investors when they bought VMware .

In case anyone else was wondering who "Simon" is, I'm pretty sure it refers to this editor: https://www.theregister.com/Author/Simon-Sharwood

Imagine being a company so big that your strategy is to kick your clients in the teeth then throttle revenue out of them.

People would care a lot less if Broadcom had very gradually increase prices over 5 years or a decade, stopped support on version 7, stopped development on version 8 and gradually changed everything starting with version 9, but they decided in all their wisdom they wanted their investment back ASAP instead of waiting.

Maybe they should have looked at the licensing and support models Veeam uses.

If you need 40,000 servers to keep your business running (which you don't, your ~3-8 million weekly transactions can be processed on 1 computer, but whatever), hire people that will work on you, and whose paycheck depends on keeping those computers working, to keep those computers working.

Game theory arguments like "they wouldn't screw me over because other people won't want to do business with them" don't work when the other party is trying to maximize quarterly earnings, and their long-term thinking is in the order of ~2 years.