VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

Vendor lock-in, contracts, and Broadcom’s playbook

• Many see Broadcom as treating VMware customers as “marks,” optimizing for short-term extraction, not long-term relationships.
• Reneging on or aggressively reinterpreting contracts is viewed as self-destructive: it invites lawsuits and destroys trust, even if it’s profitable for a few years.
• Broadcom is compared to Oracle and legacy Computer Associates: buy aging platforms with locked-in users, slash investment, hike prices, and harvest cash.
• Some argue perpetual licenses are unsustainable without support revenue, but Broadcom’s abrupt changes (rather than gradual price shifts) are what triggered the backlash.

Alternatives to VMware & the Kubernetes usability gap

• Suggested replacements: OpenStack, Kubernetes (often with KubeVirt), Proxmox, Hyper-V, Xen/XCP-ng, Nutanix, OpenShift, Harvester, CloudStack, and various HCI offerings.
• Kubernetes is praised for scalability and modern design but widely criticized as over-complex for small/on‑prem shops unless you buy a managed control plane.
• There’s demand for an “ESXi-like” Kubernetes distro: appliance-style, GUI-first, easy ingress, certificate handling, etcd management, and integrated VM migration/VM management.
• Lightweight options (Talos, k0s) are noted but often still seen as “premium” or too complex for budget-constrained IT.

Migration difficulty and scale disagreements

• Ops people describe VMware as deeply embedded across monitoring, backups, networking, and deployments; moving off is seen as a multi‑year, resource‑intensive effort.
• Some say Tesco-scale migrations could be done in ~2–5 years with investment; others argue organizational under-staffing makes even starting hard.
• AI-assisted migration is mentioned but met with skepticism about testing, operations knowledge, and the limited amount of custom “code” in typical VMware farms.
• A side debate erupts over whether 40,000 servers is wildly excessive or reasonable for a giant retailer; critics call it overkill, defenders detail POS, logistics, analytics, and telemetry workloads and local-store redundancy.

Enterprise licensing, quality, and incentives

• Broad frustration with enterprise software: prices in the millions, poor support, and buggy products that impose huge hidden costs on dev/ops teams.
• Licensing models (per-core, capacity, per-employee, time-zone limits) are seen as increasingly contorted and extractive, especially as hardware scales.
• Commenters argue shareholder incentives favor squeezing locked-in customers over improving quality or support, and many customers tolerate it instead of walking away.

VMware-specific experiences and desktop products

• Long-time VMware admins report love/hate: powerful capabilities but buggy software, painful renewals, and constant attempts to upsell or change terms.
• Some organizations have already committed to going from “100% VMware to 0%” after the Broadcom changes.
• Fusion/Workstation becoming free is noted, but the download/registration process and removed auto-update flow are widely criticized; graphics performance is called poor for gaming.
• Past vendor experiences (e.g., driver certification) portray VMware as bureaucratic, expensive to certify against, and difficult to work with even before Broadcom.

Microsoft ecosystem and collaboration tools tangent

• As a contrast, Microsoft licensing is described by some as more predictable and less adversarial, despite its own lock-in.
• A large subthread debates Microsoft Teams: some see it as “fine” and better than legacy tools; many complain about performance, UI complexity, poor text editing, and confusing chat/channel organization.
• Alternatives like Slack, Zoom, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, and Zulip are discussed; network effects and Office integration keep many shops on Teams despite dissatisfaction.
• Excel emerges as another lock-in pillar: some insist most users don’t truly “need” it; others argue that for business users under time pressure, its robustness and familiarity are non-negotiable.