HOWTO: Buy a Business Then Screw Everything Up About It (Including Customers)
This whole VMware/Broadcom acquisition leaves me with a mucky dirty feel that makes me want to wash my hands until there's no trace left.
I've got a VMUG subscription so I can use and enhance my skills with VMware. But with all the customers now bailing out it seems like working skills in VMware won't be much sought after in the marketplace anyway.
I am considering attempting a migration to Proxmox sometime soon, because not only is it unlikely that I will renew, but it's looking like high risk that even things like VMUG will still be around when it comes up for renewal early next year. And in the process of migrating I'm going to get skills that probably are more in demand right now, namely "migration from vsphere".
With this latest change to the portal system, all of my links to software, release notes, KBs and things I'd use are now all broken. I might as well start afresh with all of those. 404 Page Not Found.
I don't have a Site ID so I can't add entitlements to anything and I can't get to the original download pages on VMware anymore.
I became subscribed to an ESXi community group (at some point in the distant past) and started receiving daily digests of all the posts since the migration. Whatever setting was there in VMware somehow has been changed during migration so I've had to go in and figure out how to unsubscribe from something I was never getting from the first place.
Now, even security notices are being hidden behind a login screen, seemingly for no good purpose.
All in all, I am just seeing breakage of previously useful things, carnage of productive resources, pointless inconvenience to me as a tech, and agro for no real purpose other than "Broadcom". The VMware name is now just becoming trash sucked up by an organisation which seems to operate some sort of twisted business model where it looks like they have no qualms about pissing people off and don't see that that their current approach is not going to help them make money and will simply destroy all goodwill.
Someone needs to tap people at Broadcom on the shoulder and remind them that they bought a business that while certainly needed changes, was worth what they paid for it because some things it did generated money. It makes no business sense at all to crap all over the things that made VMware valuable in the first place - least of all customers.