Broadcom to buy VMware 'on Thursday for $60 billion' Broadcom is to acquire VMware for $60 billion in a deal that will be announced on Thursday. That's according to the Wall Street Journal. VMware is scheduled to report its Q1 2023 results on the same day, so the Thursday announcement theory is not entirely unrealistic. Neither biz has had anything to say about the reported …
...It's waste of money for Broadcom to buy a business that paywalls features added onto open source software. Broadcom hates FLOSS ecosystems unless it will cost them sales. Because of this I think it will only lead to increasing the stagnation rate of an open septic tank. Decades ago VMware lost the ability to stay ahead of the FLOSS innovation curve and they have been riding their momentum since. I have a hard time believing that they have another $61 Billion of momentum left.
Of course it's also possible next year a Big Mac will cost $1,000.
I'm not sure they had too much of a future, anyhow. VMWare charges big money for features just slightly more polished than their quickly-developing open source competitors... They got entrenched by being first out of the gate, and have better support for old legacy OSes, but every year that matters a little bit less. Dell obviously thinks cashing-out is the better strategy.
Are there any statistics on the percentage of the tech industry that different corporations have owned over time. It seems that the never ending pace of acquisitions and mergers, we are just cementing an oligopoly of huge tech companies that eat all the little ones. I thought regulators were meant to stop this kind of thing?
Regulators can block it within the countries. The problems it it is largely US tech firms and the US regulators are very happy to let oligopolies form. Other countries can regulate monopolistic behaviours inside their own market, but I doubt they can stop mergers/acquisitions in another country.
Negative. Broadcom won't decimate VMWare staff.
They will make VMWare do it prior to completing the acquisition. Existing VMWare management will have to wield the axe. Shove all their team off the cliff, and then be forced to jump themselves. Depressing & unmotivating.
On the upside... Competitors know this. Watch for top talent cherry picking, and take their phone call.
The company I was at was a Symantec AND CA customer, so we got a front row seat for what's going to happen. All the sales suits that didn't get fired on day 1 moved to HQ, and every single developer job was sent offshore or targeted for offshore immediately. They fired all the salespeople we were working with to renew licenses during the buyout; we couldn't buy licenses for months.
It's too bad because VMWare was basically the last on-prem hypervisor that was commercially supported and had a company that cared about it making updates. (Microsoft's killing on-prem Windows so they're not innovating on Hyper-V anymore, XenServer is basically dead, so it's all open source like Proxmox or OpenStack. It'll definitely increase Azure/AWS lock-in because both companies have their own proprietary on-prem cloud stack thingy.
Reposted from yesterday's note on the topic:
Avago's playbook:grab and squeeze
Broadcom has now a pretty long track record in both SW and HW acquisitions. Always plays the same: reduce staff, pressure clients with exclusive contracts, raise prices; all to hit their target margins. Repeat with next acquisition as the prior carcass is squeezed dry.
This is good for shareholders and senior execs obviously. Bad for everyone else. Even the remaining staff: I cant imagine those RSUs can somehow pay for a decent work/life balance.
VMWare's many customers should/will raise strong concerns and the ruling bodies worldwide would likely give such an acquisition the electron microscope treatment as a result.
This requires a new popcorn machine.
ETA: the squeezing doesn't stop when the deal is done. It is constant and continuous. Staff can expect multiple waves of reductions. Best of luck to all.
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