1. Broadcom’s short‑term profit‑maximizing strategy for VMware
Commenters repeatedly argue that Broadcom plans to extract as much cash as possible from VMware before letting it decline, using steep price hikes and minimal support.
- “Broadcom has absolutely zero interest in the long‑term future of VMware. Their only goal is to squeeze as much money out of it as possible before it goes bust.” – crote
- “Unlike Hock Tan, you forgot to raise the prices 5‑10×. Then your 0.1% of customers generating 20% of your revenue turn into 0.1% of your customers generating the same amount of revenue as 100% of customers were before with lower operating costs and thus higher margins.” – quickthrowman
2. Real‑world migrations away from VMware (e.g., Tottenham Hotspur, Tesco)
Several users cite concrete cases where organizations replaced VMware with HPE or other platforms, highlighting large licensing savings and debates over control versus cloud reliance.
- “Tottenham Hotspur (…) has saved over 85 percent in licensing fees by replacing (…) VMware instance with Hewlett‑Packard Enterprise’s VME.” – gchamonlive
- “Tottenham Hotspur Stadium has 20,000 network access points, 1,849 IPTV screens, and 519 CCTV screens… running their own servers seems both more reliable and cheaper than renting.” – Symbiote
3. Enterprise lock‑in, migration difficulty, and evaluation of alternatives
The discussion stresses that many large organizations feel trapped by VMware’s depth of integration, lack of migration expertise, and perceived risk, even while considering alternatives like Proxmox, HPE GreenLake, SUSE, or Azure Local.
- “They tend to be large complex enterprises outside tech. They don’t have the people (from the cto/cio down) to execute a migration well.” – lokar
- “At my $dayjob we use Proxmox and it's good enough. I think Proxmox would be good enough for most orgs.” – INTPenis
- “Tesco claimed Broadcom hiked its VMware prices by about 175 percent in UK court filings.” – celsoazevedo