Since Broadcom’s $61 billion acquisition of VMware closed in November 2023, Broadcom has been charging ahead with major changes to the company’s personnel and products. In December, Broadcom began laying off thousands of employees and stopped selling perpetually licensed versions of VMware products, pushing its customers toward more stable and lucrative software subscriptions instead. In January, it ended its partner programs, potentially disrupting sales and service for many users of its products.
This week, Broadcom is making a change that is smaller in scale but possibly more relevant for home users of its products: The free version of VMware’s vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi, is being discontinued.
They are planning to tolerate losing 95% of their customers. Of about 100,000 customers, they only care about 600 of them much, and about 6 thousand kind of, if they want to stick around, but not too much. The rest are fully expected to bail.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/30/broadcom_strategy_vmware_customer_impact/