VMware Price Hikes? Between 800 and 1,500% Since Acquisition By Broadcom, Claim Euro Customers (theregister.com) 44
Broadcom has upped VMware licensing costs by between eight to 15 times since it took over the organization, and a lack of alternatives in the tech industry means trade and end customers have no choice but to play ball. From a report: This is the according to the European Cloud Competition Observatory (ECCO), an independent body formed by customer organizations, and CISPE -- a trade association of 37 cloud providers in the region -- to monitor the behavior of software vendors accused of abusing their monopoly position. The report also calls for regulatory intervention. The current subscription model "creates a material risk for the company and their shareholders should Regulators investigate and challenge the legality of such model," the report adds.
Time limited headache (Score:4, Insightful)
When the license expires then your servers will become problematic to access.
And what happens if Broadcom no longer want to extend your license?
Re: Time limited headache (Score:3)
That would have been something worth thinking about before first buying into VMWare. Most services with a subscription model havd this risk. It is not that great for software. The whole SaaS model is questionable due to this type of risk.
Re: (Score:3)
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%2Fvm... [wired.com]
Re: (Score:2)
The Broadcom fuckers have already made it difficult to find and download the free Workstation installer for Linux. I didn't check, but it's probably equally annoying for Windows users. Player and Workstation have been free for personal use for a long time. They still are but finding them is a bitch and requires an account to access the downloads.
I'm just glad we stopped in forcing antitrust law (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Also this article suggests there are no alternatives, but we fired them just fine.
Re: (Score:2)
They don't have a monopoly though. Also this article suggests there are no alternatives
and a lack of alternatives in the tech industry means trade and end customers have no choice but to play ball.
monopoly: the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.
LoL. What do they have?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Or, you know, QEMU. I'm pretty sure it's even available for Windows, but I'm not sure how many businesses are running their virtualization software on Windows.
No, I mean that legitimately. I have no idea. It seems like a wasteful idea if you ask me, but who am I to judge?
Re: I'm just glad we stopped in forcing antitrust (Score:2)
Hyper-V is a thing too. For companies with already heavy Microsoft involvement, it makes sense.
Re: (Score:2)
Has Oracle added a pricing plan for VirtualBox Extension Pack meant for a small business with fewer than 50 seats?
Re: (Score:2)
What do they have?
A pointy-clicky frontend on 50+ year old technology. It's value is enabling low cost IT muppets to manage resources. Without that you have to employ people that understand things and solve problems without filing support requests.
Re: (Score:3)
If you want some fun, search this site for 'VMware' and then go back to the very first article posted with that term.
Trust me. It's hilarious. The 'smart' people decided it was impossible and more than a few thought that dual booting was the solution. The comments got virtualization all wrong.
Seriously, go look it up. It'll amuse you. Go back to the very first time it was posted, some time in the mid-90s. I recall that there were comments about using Win95 in the thread, so it's pretty old.
Hold on... I spen
Re: (Score:2)
In that thread, some AC wrote:
IBM has been doing this for many years with their VM/CMS operating system.
So they weren't all clueless.
Re: (Score:2)
The mainframe VM line by IBM exploits the fact that IBM System/360 and its descendants conform to the Popek-Goldberg virtualization criteria. In the 1990s, the x86 CPUs did NOT conform to these, so x86 virtualization was not a straightforward task. No wonder that people had doubts.
Re: (Score:2)
Holy Schitt.. THAT was hilarious!! Damn, in some ways, we've come sooo damn far, and other ways, we've gone backwards.
Re: (Score:2)
So I think your question is genuine and thoughtful (Score:3)
It's not just about having a monopoly. If you have a dominant market position that also triggers antitrust law and it has to because otherwise companies will abuse their dominant market position to quickly achieve a monopoly.
Antitrust law isn't just about monopolies it's about competition. It's the referee of capitalism. You cannot have unfettered capitalism and the invisible hand no matter what anyone tells you. Those things simply do not work. If you w
Re: (Score:3)
And even if there are competitors in the market, if you have a product which once implemented, is not easy to migrate away from, it feels a bit like a monopoly to the current customers.
Re: (Score:1)
It has to be that way because once somebody is in a dominant position they quickly dominate the market through underhanded means. Nobody in business plays fair so the government forces them to whether they want to or not.
Thank you for illustrating (Score:1)
They have a dominant market position. Just because they're all competitors doesn't mean those competitors are viable. Yes if you are an extremely large company the size of Google or Microsoft you can grab an open source package and roll your own vms. There are also a handful of commercial options that do not scale the way VMware does.
As a result of their dominant market position a properly regulated econo
Re: (Score:2)
You can always run Openstack (free) or pay someone to run it for you. There's also Nutanix...hyper-V....or professionally supported KVM solutions from Redhat, Canonical, Suse, etc. Lots of ways to skin this cat without sending a penny to Broadcom.
Say it 1500% fast! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I can't see how it could be.
Here's how: "Prices have often increased tenfold."
Easily possible: big pharma (Score:2)
Nine-times price rise?
If the price hike is 1,500% then the new price is sixteen times the original price, not nine times. If you don't believe prices can increase that much then you have not been following what some US pharmaceutical companies have been doing to the prices of medications that some people need to survive. The difference here is that it is only companies whose lives are dependent on VMware and even then it is possible to pay the development cost to switch to an alternative so at least nobody should die this time a
Re: (Score:2)
I don't short Broadcom, bc short sales are a short-term play. They have to lose market value, and lose market value quickly for the short term play to work.
Broadcom are incredibly successful in the short term at making enough quick billions to keep their investors happy the whole time they're destroying trillions of dollars worth in value. Problem is the trillions of value they destroyed will not suppress their stock price - at least not in the short term. They'll be moving on to a new target nex
Antitrust is not involved here (Score:1, Interesting)
If VMware was the only game in the market (it's not), and if the price hike was unannounced and absurd (yes to both) then there would be anticompetitive elements which regulators hate. Europe is as usual overboard on whining about US companies doing ANYTHING profitable but let's focus on facts.
The only advantages VMware has are that there was a free version, that you could use it on bare iron, and being one of the first it became entrenched. There IS a cost to converting over to some other hypervisor, and
Re: (Score:2)
:middle finger:
I came up with this one years ago: ..|..
Re: (Score:2)
_\\//
"live long and prosper"
Re:Antitrust is not involved here (Score:4, Informative)
VMware is a de facto monopoly, and just because in some specific cases you know an alternative does not mean it's an alternative for the friendly datacenter down the road.
Re: (Score:2)
VMware has support in lots of other ecosystems, which other hypervisors lack. [...] If you are running Cisco ACI on your network, you are basically stuck with VMM
Unless VMWare has done something to prevent those other ecosystems from supporting other hypervisors, that doesn't seem like VMWare's fault. It just seems like a big opportunity for competitors of Cisco to add support for other hypervisors in order to beat out Cisco, as well as an opportunity for third party vendors to figure out how to integrate Cisco with non-VMware hypervisors. And of course, Cisco will need to add support for other hypervisors in order to fend off its competitors.
It would be differen
Re: (Score:2)
And that means that VMWare should fall under monopoly regulations, and act with care when it comes to price hikes and contract re-negotiation.
Re: (Score:2)
Did I say anything about being illegal or VMWare's fault or similar? I just stated that VMWare is a de facto monopoly in the virtualization business.
And that means that VMWare should fall under monopoly regulations, and act with care when it comes to price hikes and contract re-negotiation.
Monopolies aren't required to follow any particular rules around price hikes or contract re-negotiation -- not unless they're trying to insert provisions restricting use of competing products. It's not illegal to exploit your monopoly to maximize revenue from that product, it's only illegal to use the monopoly position to build or maintain market share in a different product space, or to prevent competitors in that space from competing. On the contrary VMWare's actions are turbocharging competition in the
Re: (Score:2)
the FOSS community will develop a full ecosystem replacement
Will it? Does that kind of "community" still exist? I don't think that's true anymore.
Something happened. The water has been poisoned. The university geeks of the '70s and 80's, young white boys that made stuff just because they could and it was cool, have moved on. Either because they're old and retired, or because a bunch of hate-fillet wokelets have chased them out. Check out Lunduke's channel sometime: he regularly reports on all the nasty shit going on in "open" source: not a week goes by witho
This is unheard of (Score:2)
Kindof stupid move (Score:2)
Theyâ(TM)re just making themselves irrelevant. There are plenty of other equally good or better virtualisation options out there, including free ones, especially if you're on Linux.
Fuck Hock Tan... (Score:2)
...and the horse he rode in on.
Hyper-V FTW (Score:1)
near-peers (Score:2)
What vmware has is a product that doesn't have any near-peers at the enterprise level. There are substantially better alternatives at the SMB level and vmware is losing them in droves.
The thing to watch is how the 'SMB' level products are working very hard to bridge the enterprise gap and become near-enough peers to vmware to get the enterprise over.
Now, there are radically different models that are peer-level with vmware, they're just so foreign a design to existing IT staff that it's a difficult migratio
Article not being written correctly (Score:3)