Broadcom ends easy elasticity for VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware by Broadcom has made another change to its licenses – this time by disallowing on-demand use of its software in VMware Cloud on AWS. In an email sent to customers late last week, VMware by Broadcom stated: "To continue delivering you the best possible experience, we are moving to a subscription-only model for the …

[Mr.Nobody]

Mafia voice or Burns Voice?

I never know what sort of Simpsons character accent to have in my brain when I see these sort of statements from Broadcom:

"73 percent of respondents expect VMware prices to rise by 100 percent or more. VMware by Broadcom insists its price changes are misunderstood and that the list price of its products have fallen."

No one ever paid list price for VMware products in the past. Just like they never paid list price for storage, compute or network gear from any of the major suppliers. We buy storage from one of the big vendors for somewhere in the 30-40% range of list price. Requiring customers to buy a bloated, bundled set of products that most customers don't want or need to just get the one or two features they do need, and then making them switch to a subscription product (which no one bought before, because it cost more than perpetual) that price 300-600% more than the old one is just plain evil.

I just don't know if it is Mafiaso evil or Standard Corporate Greed evil.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Mafia voice or Burns Voice?

Both...

[goblinski]

Isn't it clear by now that Broadcom doesn't give a rat's behind whether VMWare exists or not ?

Their stock went up something $600 since January. Their valuation went up by six or seven times the $69b they paid for VMWare. At this point they can write it off or whatever - it served its purpose.

In the meantime, the pricing of VMWare stuff will keep following the Wholefoods model, so well defined by Mr Gaffigan:

"...But you know what? I blame Whole Foods. I do. They’re just bored at Whole Foods. They’re like, “What else can we sell these idiots? Just get me a plant. Not that one. That’s poison ivy. Wait. Can we make milk out of that? Give me the other one. What is this? Kale? It tastes bad? They’ll think it’s good for them. Charge 20 bucks for it.” And we’re like, “Ah.” But I go to Whole Foods. I do. I waste my money there. They should just have a garbage can at the entrance of Whole Foods with a picture of a wallet over it. You just go..."

[Vikingforties]

Newspeak

Some corporate Newspeak at its finest there.... "To continue delivering the best possible customer experience".

I remember going for "New Start" at BT years ago.... it was their euphemism for the redundancy program. Thankfully, I qualified for it :-D

[RockyKoer]

Broadcom..

.. where software goes to die.

Broadcom acquired a company that a good friend of mine helped build over a decade. While she made a killing in stock options, within three years the company was a mere shell as most of of the original team (and their energy) had left.

[Bendacious]

Migration pain

Broadcom seem to have a huge amount of faith that customers are locked in to VMWare and won’t make the leap to any competitor. Or they think that they have no real competitors. (Large customers of course, they don’t give a flying … what the small customers do). It’s true that migrating is painful but sometimes staying put is worse and sometimes you only have to push people’s buttons and they will put in the hours to see the back of you. VMWare may not see many leave in the short-term but with all this bad sentiment around I think their competitors are a good investment for the long term.

[An_Old_Dog]

Lando Said it

"This deal is getting worse all the time."

[UnknownUnknown]

Re: Lando Said it

… and Microsoft and Google ….don’t think they ain’t coming for you after they have finished fucking over AWS.

[Anonymous Coward]

you don't understand the pricing

When they tell you that you don't understand, they are calling you stupid. Politicians do the same thing. I think i remember Bush II's vice saying he didn't have time to explain the details of the policy to some reporters once. Called them stupid right to their faces and no one challenged him.

[Henry Wertz 1]

Is this even legal?

Is this even legal? I mean, companies can obviously say "you must pay for a year" and so on. I single out Apple for (after I think beginning with macOS 12?) putting licensing terms saying if a computer is rented or leased, they require the minimum length of rental to be 24 hours (and yes, they specify it's 24 *contiguous* hours so you can't just pay for 24 hours and use an hour here and there throughout the month).

So certainly VMware can make it so things must be paid for a year up front.

But can they say you must pay a year up front for AWS and only AWS, while still allowing per-minute billing on other cloud platforms? If this is just a matter of Google and Microsoft having old contracts with VMWare that haven't expired yet, then sure; otherwise... I just have this suspicion this would run afoul of some law or other.

[Chronos]

Self immolation much?

As icon. I can't see many people putting up with this for much longer, especially with ECS being much, much more convenient if you can Dockerise your app. Deploy with whatever you like, spin up additional containers behind the LB when needed automagically, no fuss or huge wads of cash needed. Nice knowing you, VMWare...