The bigger issue is, if you're refusing to honour a contract as a vendor, not only do you risk a lawsuit like this one. But more importantly, who is ever going to sign up for another contract with you? You just proved it isn't worth the paper it's written on.
Unwritten terms like "valid until I decide to tear it up haha lol" are not generally appreciated by companies that depend on your stuff for their business. Of course you can extort your existing customers until they manage to move away but basically in the longer term you're suiciding your entire business.
There seems to be a "squeeze" phase in several of the software's life. When the organization goes from engineering oriented into sales oriented. Mostly true for those acquired by investors, wanting more money on spending no more. EBITDA and other related matters becoming paramount having no decade long perspectives, not even half in some instances. No long term there. Of course, you have to find the gold mines, those with locked in users.
I have never understood how Oracle remains a big company. Seems to me they have this type of reputation and just nobody will ever willingly buy anything from them ever
To Broadcom you’re not a customer, you’re a mark, a patsy, stooge, a _victim_. Their aim is to establish exactly what they can get away with, how far they can abuse you, before you’ll just walk away.
> Many mid-market and regional operators view the new [subscription] structure as untenable and are actively exploring alternatives.. Nutanix emerged early as the leading competitive alternative to VMware.. over 2,700 new customers.. driven by organizations fleeing VMware's new pricing model.. [including] more than 50 Global 2000 companies, representing major enterprises willing to undertake complex, multi-year infrastructure overhauls.. With VMware serving approximately 200,000 customers globally, Nutanix sees most of the migration opportunity still ahead.
If you need 40,000 servers to keep your business running (which you don't, your ~3-8 million weekly transactions can be processed on 1 computer, but whatever), hire people that will work on you, and whose paycheck depends on keeping those computers working, to keep those computers working.
Game theory arguments like "they wouldn't screw me over because other people won't want to do business with them" don't work when the other party is trying to maximize quarterly earnings, and their long-term thinking is in the order of ~2 years.
You are severely underappreciating how complex a retail organization of Tesco's size is.
I work in this space for a retailer almost the same size as Tesco and when factoring in all the attendant organizations, businesses, and functions it requires, 40k servers does not surprise me at all.
Outside of just the brick-and-mortar stores you have Marketing, Retail, eComm, Merchandising, Strategic Sourcing, FP&A, Finance & Accounting, Asset Protection, Corporate Real Estate, Retail Real Estate, Internal Audit, Supply Chain, Transportation, Business Services, Data Science, etc etc. and IT at every level of those. Each one of these components is large enough to be a medium-to-large sized company in its own right.
You’re ignoring general heavy workloads such as observability. How much telemetry do they gather and analyze for tracking and fraud detection. A quick google on Tesco engineering shows that they process 35k qps against couchbase, and 35 terrabytes of telemetry data per day.
They track 150k devices in their ecosystem, which, reading between the lines, would produce the telemetry and require observability, state management, anomaly detection, etc. They have hundreds of thousands of employees using these devices for varying purposes. We’re talking quite a bit of compute, which also requires high availability.
I know nothing about Tesco beyond that quick google search, but I’ve been at several companies where I would read online comments claiming we could reduce our workload to a few servers, and I would think of our tens of thousands of fully loaded machines and roll my eyes.
This is the ghost of Charlie Wang haunting the software industry. Computer Associates was notorious for this kind of licensing shenanigans. Guess where Computer Associates is now? A new generation of IT departments are discovering the Long Island wiseguy approach to licensing.
I was running about 1000 machines on VMware in my previous career. It was always a love/hate relationship with them. We were able to achieve a lot of our goals using VMware and it was hard not to be ecstatic about the results. At the same time, they were always a nightmare to deal with, the software was buggy and support wasn't great.
I always dreaded renewal time because it was normal for them to use it as an opportunity to extort us. Microsoft was a breeze in comparison. It's funny because Microsoft always had such a horrible reputation. I don't know if I was just so abused by VMware or what, but Microsoft was just easy. We had an annual true-up date and we always knew where we stood with them. We reported our numbers and that was it. No surprises ever and there was never an issue if we didn't report any growth. VMware was always pulling some kind of shit and was absolutely determined to push us over budget every time.
The state of software companies is pretty terrible. I have been on the acquisition side as well as the development / end-user side and it’s mind-boggling knowing the exorbitant costs with bare minimum value delivered, yet companies just keep paying whatever they’re told it costs, until it’s comically astronomical and the customers have to tell them to get bent. Yet still, software vendors keep changing their licensing structure until it meets that comically astronomical figure and pushing customers away.
Enterprise software licensing, support contracts, and technical account managers (TAMs) often run into hundreds of thousands or millions annually per organization. Yet, in practice, support tickets go unresolved or ignored, even for large clients.
The software quality of our most expensive products is extremely poor and unreliable, almost across the board. Many products suffer from bugs, outdated features, or incompatibility issues that disrupt operations. In development roles, this means wasted time on workarounds, custom patches, or integrations that shouldn't be necessary. For a non-small organization, this scales up to significant productivity losses and hidden costs in overhead.
These companies actively alienate us, the customer, through their business practices. Changes like aggressive licensing shifts (e.g., moving from per-core to per-employee models) force reevaluations and migrations and eroding trust (i.e. Oracle with Java, VMWare fiasco). This isn't isolated—it's a pattern where short-term revenue grabs risk long-term relationships, yet companies seem unfazed.
This jacks the entire ecosystem up. These practices stifle innovation by locking customers into suboptimal tools, increase overall IT spend industry-wide, and contribute to employee burnout in dev and ops teams.
It seems like it’s a race to the bottom. The strategy is to create an ecosystem with high switching costs and vendor lock-in. It just doesn’t seem sustainable, yet- it keeps truckin’ along.
My pet peeve is core-based licensing for products such as database engines. For that matter, any kind of capacity licensing tied to some variant of Moore’s law inevitably results in the vendor holding their product’s face under water as the tide rises around them.
As a random example, SQL Server Standard Edition is limited to a “very generous” maximum of four sockets, 24 cores, or 128 GB of memory.
That’s just slightly bigger then a laptop these days!
The problem here is that Microsoft kept their license limits as constants relative to a reality that moved exponentially. They would have to have applied “inflation”, but they just saw their sales figures go up and up… and nobody will rock that boat!
Inevitably they’ll keep choking their product until it turns purple and dies. It’s a force of nature, there is nothing anybody can do do counter this naked corporate greed that is enabled by accidental mis-pricing. This can never be corrected, except by letting products die and be replaced wholesale in the market.
Agreed. My org can take some of the blame but with our big vendors:
10s of millions on Adobe - admin side craps out all the time, terrible outsourced support (easy to escalate past them but still annoying that we sometimes have to start there)
10s of millions on Microsoft - Laissez-faire attitude about when they will update stuff during renewals and true-ups. Not specific date. Little help.
Broadcom - PE play (as we know from Broadcom) to squeeze every penny out. Have been through several account managers now. They won't sell through VARs anymore, only direct, and to get anything beyond VCF you have to be on a very special list that supposedly the CEO personally approves (which is beyond mind-boggling).
Starting to see some post production software be licensed based on having limited amount of contiguous time zones which is also crazy for a global company
Note: Media and healthcare industries may be SOL because there are lots of content and cybersec 'requirements' for having private clouds. Curious what others in those industries are doing
A lot of it is the cost of doing business. We'll see how it goes when MS moves to the consumption model they're proposing.
I know someone (I'm not going to say who - too many sue-happy people are accused here) who was using VMWare at work, and they decided to switch to virtualbox because they trusted Oracle more than Broadcom. Oracle has long has a reputation of being licensing jerks, but they are still trusted more than Boardcom.
Perpetual licenses are eventually very bad for business if nobody pays for support. Nobody pays for support if they remotely think they will not need it.
Shit starts hitting the fan when you actually need excellent support and get a (huge) invoice.
People would care a lot less if Broadcom had very gradually increase prices over 5 years or a decade, stopped support on version 7, stopped development on version 8 and gradually changed everything starting with version 9, but they decided in all their wisdom they wanted their investment back ASAP instead of waiting.
Maybe they should have looked at the licensing and support models Veeam uses.
Nobody pays for support if they remotely think they will not need it.
Maybe in your experience. Virtually every company I've worked for or with in the last 2-3 decades (mostly enterprise shops to be fair) paid for support on critial infrastructure like VMware. Most of them are required to by various contract or regulatory requirement (like the Very Large Financial I'm at now). The tiny number of shops I worked with that blew off support were 1) SMB, and 2) run by idiots. YMMV.
Yes, but just try to download it from them. You have to make an account, agree to all kinds of garbage, and then you still might be stuck in "authorization" like my account is.
They removed the auto-update functionality (even the notification!) from the app, so you have to manually go through their horrendous website to download updates.
It's 10x easier to just search reddit or internet archive for a link to the .dmg.
Yep! I use it to run SolidWorks on my M1 Macbook. (They sure don't make it easy, though - one of their many EULA approval steps fails silently if you have any non-alphanuneric characters in your name or email address. Feels par for the course with bigcorp software that assumes you'll have an IT team to deal with things.)
In a past life in the mid/late 2000s, I did 10GbE NIC drivers for a small IHV. VMWare was by far the most awful vendor to deal with. They had mandatory certification testing which was required to distribute the driver. Their tests were so much worse than MS WHQL. There was invariably something broken in their tests that we had to work around. Each time this happened, we had to go through their support (And pay for the privilege) to tell them their tests were broken and to give them patches to fix it. This would happen pretty much every driver release, and we would end up dealing with a different person each time.
My favorite thing about leaving that job was never having to deal with VMWare ever again.
VMware Fusion's graphics drivers suck harder than a Dyson. For the love of god, I just want to play some games without rebooting to a native Windows environment. I'm not even asking to run, say, Crysis, or something... I guess my days are numbered as an x64 Mac user but let me at least go out with some dignity.
We ran 100% of our workloads on VMWare this time last year. We'll be at 0% this time next year. We were heading that direction over the long term anyway, but the Broadcom shenanigans made us double down on that effort. They may actually be more unpleasant to deal with than Oracle, which is something I would have thought to be impossible.
Remember: Broadcoms’ (the non-chip part of it) business model is to buy tech companies in long term decline (VMware: check) that have a significant locked in customer base (VMware: check), slash development and support while raising prices.
They extract as much cash out of the decaying corpse as they can, and then discard it.
They were actually fairly open about this to investors when they bought VMware .
29 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 56.8 ms ] threadUnwritten terms like "valid until I decide to tear it up haha lol" are not generally appreciated by companies that depend on your stuff for their business. Of course you can extort your existing customers until they manage to move away but basically in the longer term you're suiciding your entire business.
In case anyone else was wondering who "Simon" is, I'm pretty sure it refers to this editor: https://www.theregister.com/Author/Simon-Sharwood
> Many mid-market and regional operators view the new [subscription] structure as untenable and are actively exploring alternatives.. Nutanix emerged early as the leading competitive alternative to VMware.. over 2,700 new customers.. driven by organizations fleeing VMware's new pricing model.. [including] more than 50 Global 2000 companies, representing major enterprises willing to undertake complex, multi-year infrastructure overhauls.. With VMware serving approximately 200,000 customers globally, Nutanix sees most of the migration opportunity still ahead.
If you need 40,000 servers to keep your business running (which you don't, your ~3-8 million weekly transactions can be processed on 1 computer, but whatever), hire people that will work on you, and whose paycheck depends on keeping those computers working, to keep those computers working.
Game theory arguments like "they wouldn't screw me over because other people won't want to do business with them" don't work when the other party is trying to maximize quarterly earnings, and their long-term thinking is in the order of ~2 years.
I work in this space for a retailer almost the same size as Tesco and when factoring in all the attendant organizations, businesses, and functions it requires, 40k servers does not surprise me at all.
Outside of just the brick-and-mortar stores you have Marketing, Retail, eComm, Merchandising, Strategic Sourcing, FP&A, Finance & Accounting, Asset Protection, Corporate Real Estate, Retail Real Estate, Internal Audit, Supply Chain, Transportation, Business Services, Data Science, etc etc. and IT at every level of those. Each one of these components is large enough to be a medium-to-large sized company in its own right.
I know nothing about Tesco beyond that quick google search, but I’ve been at several companies where I would read online comments claiming we could reduce our workload to a few servers, and I would think of our tens of thousands of fully loaded machines and roll my eyes.
Imagine being a company so big that your strategy is to kick your clients in the teeth then throttle revenue out of them.
I always dreaded renewal time because it was normal for them to use it as an opportunity to extort us. Microsoft was a breeze in comparison. It's funny because Microsoft always had such a horrible reputation. I don't know if I was just so abused by VMware or what, but Microsoft was just easy. We had an annual true-up date and we always knew where we stood with them. We reported our numbers and that was it. No surprises ever and there was never an issue if we didn't report any growth. VMware was always pulling some kind of shit and was absolutely determined to push us over budget every time.
Enterprise software licensing, support contracts, and technical account managers (TAMs) often run into hundreds of thousands or millions annually per organization. Yet, in practice, support tickets go unresolved or ignored, even for large clients.
The software quality of our most expensive products is extremely poor and unreliable, almost across the board. Many products suffer from bugs, outdated features, or incompatibility issues that disrupt operations. In development roles, this means wasted time on workarounds, custom patches, or integrations that shouldn't be necessary. For a non-small organization, this scales up to significant productivity losses and hidden costs in overhead.
These companies actively alienate us, the customer, through their business practices. Changes like aggressive licensing shifts (e.g., moving from per-core to per-employee models) force reevaluations and migrations and eroding trust (i.e. Oracle with Java, VMWare fiasco). This isn't isolated—it's a pattern where short-term revenue grabs risk long-term relationships, yet companies seem unfazed.
This jacks the entire ecosystem up. These practices stifle innovation by locking customers into suboptimal tools, increase overall IT spend industry-wide, and contribute to employee burnout in dev and ops teams.
It seems like it’s a race to the bottom. The strategy is to create an ecosystem with high switching costs and vendor lock-in. It just doesn’t seem sustainable, yet- it keeps truckin’ along.
As a random example, SQL Server Standard Edition is limited to a “very generous” maximum of four sockets, 24 cores, or 128 GB of memory.
That’s just slightly bigger then a laptop these days!
Azure offers a new VM series where the max memory limit of SQL Std is exceeded with just four cores (8 vCPUs): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/siz...
There are VMs available now that have crossed the “kilo core” threshold. You can draw pictures in their task manager by creatively putting load on the processors: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/siz...
The problem here is that Microsoft kept their license limits as constants relative to a reality that moved exponentially. They would have to have applied “inflation”, but they just saw their sales figures go up and up… and nobody will rock that boat!
Inevitably they’ll keep choking their product until it turns purple and dies. It’s a force of nature, there is nothing anybody can do do counter this naked corporate greed that is enabled by accidental mis-pricing. This can never be corrected, except by letting products die and be replaced wholesale in the market.
Time to learn PostgreSQL, I guess…
10s of millions on Adobe - admin side craps out all the time, terrible outsourced support (easy to escalate past them but still annoying that we sometimes have to start there)
10s of millions on Microsoft - Laissez-faire attitude about when they will update stuff during renewals and true-ups. Not specific date. Little help.
Broadcom - PE play (as we know from Broadcom) to squeeze every penny out. Have been through several account managers now. They won't sell through VARs anymore, only direct, and to get anything beyond VCF you have to be on a very special list that supposedly the CEO personally approves (which is beyond mind-boggling).
Starting to see some post production software be licensed based on having limited amount of contiguous time zones which is also crazy for a global company
Note: Media and healthcare industries may be SOL because there are lots of content and cybersec 'requirements' for having private clouds. Curious what others in those industries are doing
A lot of it is the cost of doing business. We'll see how it goes when MS moves to the consumption model they're proposing.
People would care a lot less if Broadcom had very gradually increase prices over 5 years or a decade, stopped support on version 7, stopped development on version 8 and gradually changed everything starting with version 9, but they decided in all their wisdom they wanted their investment back ASAP instead of waiting.
Maybe they should have looked at the licensing and support models Veeam uses.
Maybe in your experience. Virtually every company I've worked for or with in the last 2-3 decades (mostly enterprise shops to be fair) paid for support on critial infrastructure like VMware. Most of them are required to by various contract or regulatory requirement (like the Very Large Financial I'm at now). The tiny number of shops I worked with that blew off support were 1) SMB, and 2) run by idiots. YMMV.
It's 10x easier to just search reddit or internet archive for a link to the .dmg.
My favorite thing about leaving that job was never having to deal with VMWare ever again.
They extract as much cash out of the decaying corpse as they can, and then discard it.
They were actually fairly open about this to investors when they bought VMware .