For starters, Dell and VMware didn't merge. Dell merged with EMC and thus took a majority stakeholder position in VMware stock, letting Michael Dell stack the b

For starters, Dell and VMware didn't merge. Dell merged with EMC and thus took a majority stakeholder position in VMware stock, letting Michael Dell stack the board and generally steer things in Dell's favor. In my personal opinion, this was generally to the detriment of VMware's products (downward pressure to focus on features that made little or no sense, except to give Dell marketing talking points; bad impact on morale by doing things like decreasing employee benefits quality so DellEMC and VMware could jointly reap discounts), played a role in frivolous acquisitions, and generally (and understandably) caused OEMs other than Dell to disengage and keep VMware at arms-length.