from Hacker News

Dell Terminates Agreement with VMware After Broadcom Acquisition

by PaulWaldman on 1/31/24, 12:50 AM with 15 comments

  • by metadat on 1/31/24, 1:21 AM

    https://archive.is/PLYx3

    (Credit: @KingLancelot, who's link is somehow dead https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39198414)

  • by AtlasBarfed on 1/31/24, 7:19 PM

    Look, what are the virt products out there that can be upped to VMWare levels? There's lots of stuff in open source.

    This isn't a ground zero thing. There's probably 1,000 companies that use VMWare like capabilities, and you simply need to fund a group to bring FOSS to the level of VMWare.

    Broadcom doing the acquisition gives you a bit of runway. You probably have a year or two before things get really bad. There's probably going to be VMWare engineers that hate the acquisition and will run to a foundation to make a competing/better FOSS equivalent. VirtualBox is a toy and owned by oracle. Well, it's open source too, right? Get something up that is Oracle-free and up to snuff.

    Corporations are so stupid at IT. It really shows that basic IT management is an afterthought in B-School, when it is arguably more important than accounting and finance tricks in the long run.

    At least the CEOs bragging about not even reading email have been dinosaured.

  • by kjellsbells on 1/31/24, 5:35 AM

    Can someone ELI5 what Broadcom hoped to do with VMware? And ideally non-snarkily. I mean, what was the idea behind tying a silicon company to a...I dunno, enterprise virtualization and networking company? I dont get it. And what is the thinking behind killing off the products? What remaining product are they trying to save?

    Any takers?

  • by scohesc on 1/31/24, 4:27 PM

    I have no hopes that Broadcom will do anything beneficial with VMWare - only adjust product offerings to continue to suck as much revenue out of large companies who are slow to change things like virtualization technologies.

    Broadcom bought Symantec a few years back and our Symantec Endpoint Security licenses expired - we ended up moving to another solution because we couldn't get ahold of anybody from Symantec to renew our license even after contacting them a month in advance - even our distributor couldn't get in touch with anyone from Symantec.

    Broadcom sucks companies up and wrings every possible profit avenue dry and moves on to the next.

  • by jprd on 1/31/24, 2:17 AM

    I know there is no confidence in Broadcom "doing anything right with an acquisition", but I would _LOVE_ to see the metrics that are pushing them to rathole this whole business/channel/ecosystem in such a hurry.

  • by egberts1 on 1/31/24, 5:27 AM

  • by PaulWaldman on 1/31/24, 12:17 PM

    I wonder what incentive Dell would have to cancel this agreement? Did it limit their options for marketing competing products?

  • by KingLancelot on 1/31/24, 1:12 AM