49 ms·

Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

596 points by squidofbits 4y ago

ajaxnet 4y ago
RIP Spring
TradingPlaces 4y ago
Opinion: VMWare’s customer’s will loudly object to the FTC and this will not happen.
drumhead 4y ago
I gather they own Symantec as well, how did that go for them? $61bn is a full price to be paying at this stage of the market.
- gertrunde 4y ago
  I've no idea how well the Symantec acquisition worked for Broadcom, but it was particularly painful for anyone using Symantec products. The ordering/renewal process was so messed up by the transition that for approximately 18 months it was almost impossible to get a quote or place an order, even to renew an existing subscription, long enough that Symantec started just giving out subscription extensions to tide people over until the order process worked again.
whalesalad 4y ago
VMWare is being passed around like the village bicycle.
- EarthIsHome 4y ago
  Holy crap! Look at these acquisitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware#Acquisitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware#Acquisitions
  - mkl 4y ago
    Those are companies that VMware acquired, not companies that acquired VMware.
    - EarthIsHome 4y ago
      Whoops! Totally misunderstood that page. Thanks for pointing it out.
formerly_proven 4y ago
Can we like... stop building these ginormous conglomerates? Thanks.
- ReactiveJelly 4y ago
  If intellectual property (specifically software patents) were weakened, this would be less of a problem, right? Companies don't buy companies, they buy IP, as I understand it.
  - alberth 4y ago
    Consolidation in mature markets inevitably happens.
    - nousermane 4y ago
      ...absent functioning antitrust legislation, yes.
      - streblo 4y ago
        Is there an antitrust case to be made here? Antitrust means a lot more than just 'big company'.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        nicoburns 4y ago
        You seem to be asking if there is a case within current legislation. Whereas the parent is suggesting that more cases ought to be covered by future stricter legislation (which could at least in principle be as simple as "big company").
        mc32 4y ago
        So you put a cap in it, what happens, mitosis? I’m not sure it would have that big of an effect. It would certainly help in some areas like search and social networks though.
SSLy 4y ago
Oh no https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/uxucz4/if_vmware_is_acquired_by_broadcom_run_and_do_not/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/uxucz4/if_vm...
- nwatson 4y ago
  Yep, that's Broadcom's business model ... buy a business (VMWare), ignore its smaller customers, upsell the Fortune 500 on the product (VMWare) to push out competing solutions, and keep the line items on those Fortune 500 bills growing. It's worked for them I guess. I left a Broadcom acquisition before the takeover.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - devonkim 4y ago
    It’s kind of par for the entire enterprise market as a whole similar to the structural problems of b2b companies. SMBs are hard to serve effectively and the margins are slim, so you’ll see companies that are b2b move more toward SMB b2b (see: Best Buy although Apple is the clear exception here). Everyone chases the big accounts because the model is less risky no different than how there’s no shortage of luxury homes being built.
- TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  Why wouldn't you just post to the article directly, and bypass the horrible Reddit web site for the redirect?
  - cruano 4y ago
    Because the reddit post was also made by the author ? And he's responding to the comments there too?
    - TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
      Fair enough.
SemanticStrengh 4y ago
If they invested instead a mere Billion into optimizing a fork of e.g. QEMU they would destroy VMware in performance.
- VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
  right but they wouldn't be able to own qemu. that's what they want
- mbreese 4y ago
  This isn’t about the hypervisor. This is about the enterprise sales. A bank isn’t going to run their data center on qemu, regardless of the performance. They are going to go with the company that can sell them support contracts with dedicated engineers to answer the phone.
  - wyldfire 4y ago
    > They are going to go with the company that can sell them support contracts with dedicated engineers to answer the phone. There's no reason the company selling them support couldn't be providing support for QEMU btw. If it met their needs otherwise I'm sure they'd consider it.
  - mountainriver 4y ago
    Yup as a former employee I can confirm this is not about the hypervisor although vmw has a good hypervisor, it’s about everything auxiliary to that
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Big companies are starting to learn that free open source can be supported in house, in some cases it is even cheaper, but in others the flexibility of being in control of when a much needed by only you feature is developed is a big deal. Open source also is never acquired and the price jacked up to beyond the worth but they are forced to pay the price anyway because they can't get off before their license expires.
    - 4y ago
mysterydip 4y ago
"to speed up its expansion into the enterprise software business." Why does a chipmaker want/need to expand into enterprise software? Shouldn't they be expanding to making different chips?
- nikanj 4y ago
  Because they want something that’s not affected by the chip shortage.
  - xadhominemx 4y ago
    No, that is just incorrect. Please don’t speculate if you don’t know what you’re talking about.
    - sitkack 4y ago
      I think you misunderstand the point of HN, that is basically the only thing that occurs here.
      - xadhominemx 4y ago
        I know, but if someone just flat out makes something up I’d hope they’d hedge their language a little bit.
    - strunz 4y ago
      This was reported by multiple financial news organizations, what makes you so confident it isn't true?
      - xadhominemx 4y ago
        I am very confident this is not true. I am certain I know Broadcom’s corporate strategy and views on the semi cycle better than any financial journalist.
- BoGs83 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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boeingUH60 4y ago
Michael Dell will get $24bn! from this acquisition...It's fascinating how he turned around a struggling PC company (Dell Inc) into a financial engineering machine that made him tens of billions. https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/04/18/how-wall-streets-greatest-piece-of-financial-engineering-propelled-michael-dell-to-a-50-billion-fortune/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/04/18/how-wall...
- deleted 4y ago
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- Apocryphon 4y ago
  So he Jack Welched his own corporation?
  - papito 4y ago
    Jack Welch and his students turned companies into steaming piles of crap, not gold. GE, Boeing. A few people walk away with riches, however.
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      Good to hear that Dell’s schemes haven’t done the same to his own company. Would it be more accurate to draw a comparison to Masa Son? An entrepreneur in tech who ended up playing high stakes financial games with his company’s own money.
      - papito 4y ago
        No one is as much of a gambler as Masa Son. Masa is not particularly evil or scheming - he is just nuts.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      The Koolaid at Motorola was that they invented six sigma. Throw that on the fire too.
- 4y ago
brycewray 4y ago
Would guess they’re high-fiving at Parallels right now.
- travisgriggs 4y ago
  I’ve been going back and forth every few years between Fusion and || Desktop. I’m currently on a || swing. I guess I’ll be staying here for a while.
- temac 4y ago
  VMWare Fusion on M1 was already way behind (to an absurd point: it has been > 1 year 1/2 after the M1 launch, and VMWare has not yet launched a release of Fusion for it, only betas, and they do not target Windows). Overwhelming most of VMWare business is about other products anyway.
monkey_monkey 4y ago
Do these type of transactions ever end up well for either the acquirer or the acquired company?
- normac2 4y ago
  I think Trello and Atlassian went well (massively different scale, though). I think the rep is that Atlassian mainly does well by leaving the companies alone as independent organizations, more like investment positions rather than actually merging the tech.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Yes. See Oracle. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/market-cap https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/market...
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    Not fair to compare software companies to a law firm.
- bombcar 4y ago
  EMC bought VMware for $650 million and Dell bought EMC for $74 billion and now sold VMware for $61 billion so it worked out for someone.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    The EMC purchase of VMware was probably one of the best tech acquisitions of all time. At least financially. You can reasonably argue whether VMware's overall trajectory was better or worse as a result; in any case, most of the original leadership team ended up departing.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Someone knew something - that's an insanely low valuation for a major player in the (then just starting) virtualization market. But at the time virtualization was considered as something "to keep that old Windows NT server/software running" - not foundational for all cloud services ever.
acd 4y ago
Ponders if it will payoff as an investment. Hyper visors are nowdays commodity. Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite datacenters to the cloud. Hyperscalers AWS,Google and Azure running the cloud are running work loads on Linux KVM kernel based virtual machines.
- kasey_junk 4y ago
  I was under the impression each of those had custom hypervisors? While perhaps still Linux that doesn’t seem like a commodity.
  - sithadmin 4y ago
    They're 'custom', but are heavily derivative of KVM in the case of AWS (Nitro) and GCP. Azure runs a fork of Hyper-V, AFAIK.
  - wildfire 4y ago
    AWS' Hypervisor is Nitro. Which is based upon KVM - AIUI. https://www.kovarus.com/blog/deep-dive-into-the-aws-nitro-system/ https://www.kovarus.com/blog/deep-dive-into-the-aws-nitro-sy...
- mountainriver 4y ago
  Not a fan of vmware (I used to work there) but pretty much no one currently can compete with VMware’s full product line and optimizations
- iKevinShah 4y ago
  VMware used to be centered around Virtualization until 2015-16 or so. Since then it has moved / expanded to Software defined Datacenters (technically virtualization, yes), Automation, Security (Carbon Black) and lately, K8s (with Tanzu). That does not mean a good chunk of revenue might still be from virtualization - FWIW, I do not have any idea on that. Disclaimer: I am an ex-employee of VMware.
- voidfunc 4y ago
  Azure uses Hyper-V under the hood not kvm. Its also not built on Linux.
unabridged 4y ago
Enterprise software is such a mystery to me. I can't imagine any company ran by <40 yr olds ever paying $100k+ a year to VMWare, Symantec, Oracle, ... To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly
- ghc 4y ago
  Just for a second, imagine a company that isn't a software company, but needs software to run its business. Think manufacturing, logistics, shipping, construction, food (industrial scale egg production, for example) etc. There's a lot of companies like that out there...in fact it's almost all of them. Those companies run all their boring, essential software (accounting, ERPs, etc.) on VMWare, Oracle, Azure, etc. Since software isn't their core business, they pay an external company to keep their software running. Like it or not, cloud providers are for software companies, and most companies have no interest in becoming a software company. They might have some small groups that do analytics or software in-house, and those groups might use cloud providers, but all the essential software will be run by a company you can call when something breaks, or if you're big enough embeds some staff in your office. It's just good sense to outsource non-core functions. Software companies outsource hosting and datacenter stuff to AWS, etc. Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly?
  - nousermane 4y ago
    Exactly. Most "enterprise" software competes with a team of 3 doing it all in excel. At this rate, $100k/yr is a bargain.
    - foobiekr 4y ago
      When people talk enterprise they are talking 2000+ person companies. They are not doing their ERP payroll etc using excel.
    - FredPret 4y ago
      I do ERP and the thought of replicating it in Excel… yikes. For a big company you’ll need a team of hundreds and a huge surplus of sanity, and you’ll still have a worse outcome. An ERP is basically a database with an interface with business logic built in. Certainly not something you want to do in Excel.
caymanjim 4y ago
I didn't know VMware was still a thing. What do they even do? Who uses any of it?
- sithadmin 4y ago
  VMware has the largest on-premises hypervisor footprint by a large margin and sells a zillion other software products to layer on top. Pretty much every large public company has a VMware footprint in their data center, and frequently have their entire on-prem infrastructure built on top of vSphere.
  - caymanjim 4y ago
    Fair enough. I could have googled it. I live in a bubble of Linux and AWS/other cloud services, so this sort of thing isn't part of my world.
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  You can get three Dell servers and a VMware install ISO and have a hypervisor with a web interface, a distributed cluster filesystem replicating between the nodes, VM failover in case of hardware failure, live migration of VMs between nodes for maintenance (state and/or storage), a centralised update system, VLAN aware guest networking, isolated management networking, all up and running in production in half a day - less if you someone has already opened the boxes and racked it all up before hand. Without any great technical skills needed to setup any of it. With a bit more planning and a larger environment and more licensing, and not much more tech skills, you'll have redundant trunked network links, it will migrate VMs between nodes to balance load, integrate with the node IPMI management to power hosts down when the load is light and power them on when the load increases, and for enough money on licensing it will keep two VMs on different host nodes in sync down to the CPU instruction in case one host fails nobody will notice. Also with not much tech skills. And when I say "not much tech skills" you do need to understand enough about computing to plan it and cable things in properly and deal with VLANs and subnets and ISOs and DNS, routing, and VMware's way of doing networking, and the basics. But you need to know approximately nothing about /etc/ or XML or YAML, cluster quorums, elections, filesystem locking, heartbeat or watchdog services, distributed consensus protocols, package management, LVM, systemd, hypervisor subsystems, PAM modules, Kerberos, webservers, databases, Unix permissions, or etc. I'm under no illusions that it's cheap, or bug-free, or that you never need to SSH in and poke it ever, or that it's the right thing for every task, or that it's the modern way. But it's an amazing packaging up of a lot of things into a worldbeating product, and its integration with Dell specifically - Dell hosts, Dell EMC storage - is such a good fit that makes me surprised and sad that Dell would sell VMware.
DebtDeflation 4y ago
Not sure I understand the expected synergies here. Broadcom's main business is making embedded chips for networking and storage devices. Is this just a pure diversification play?
- dralley 4y ago
  >Is this just a pure diversification play? Probably. 6 months ago they were looking at acquiring SAS (which didn't go anywhere). The core competencies for that of those companies are even less related to what Broadcom does.
- MangoCoffee 4y ago
  yes consider Broadcom bought Symantec.
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
I don't understand the stock market. VMW at $50B market cap equates to ~$120 per share. The Broadcom acquisition is for ~20% more, and yet, the stock price is at $120, not... $145 or something. Can someone more financially literate (or with direct experience in the stock market) explain this discrepancy to me? (comment made at ~9:33am ET, stock market opened a few minutes ago)
- deleted 4y ago
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- phonon 4y ago
  "Under the terms of the agreement, which has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies, VMware shareholders will elect to receive either $142.50 in cash or 0.2520 shares of Broadcom common stock for each VMware share. The shareholder election will be subject to proration, resulting in approximately 50% of VMware’s shares being exchanged for cash consideration and 50% being exchanged for Broadcom common stock. Based on the closing price of Broadcom common stock on May 25, 2022, the total $138.23 per-share consideration represents a 44% premium to the closing price of VMware common stock on May 20, 2022, the last trading day prior to media speculation regarding a potential transaction, and a 32% premium to VMware’s unaffected 30-day volume weighted average price (VWAP). Upon closing of the transaction, based on the outstanding shares of each company as of the date hereof, current Broadcom shareholders will own approximately 88% and current VMware shareholders will own approximately 12% of the combined company on a fully diluted basis. " [1] 1. The deal might not go through, or the terms might change. 2. You might not be able to get 100% cash for your shares. [1] https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/company/vmware-broadcom.pdf https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/e...
- dodobirdlord 4y ago
  If the stock is trading at $120/share that means everyone who owns stock (and is paying attention and offering it for sale) won’t sell for less than $120. But that doesn’t mean all of them, or even most of them, would sell for $120. Many of them probably believe their stock should be worth more than $120 and expect the price to go up in the future. So if you want to buy out the whole company you have to pitch a price high enough that a majority of shareholders (or the board of directors as their fiduciary proxy) agree to sell at that price. This is basically guaranteed to be a substantially higher price than whatever the current market price is, because if the average shareholder didn’t expect the stock price to go up, why are they holding shares? As the deal becomes increasingly likely to go through, the stock price will likely gradually shift up to match the deal price.
geodel 4y ago
So far I have only used Automic Automation from Broadcom. I found it supremely crappy. Its UI brings back memory of (I guess now defunct) IBM Websphere. But it is now an "Enterprise Solution" so it has to shoved down developer's throat with full force. Just like analysts said IBM brought RedHat mainly for Openshift platform and I think there is some truth to it. Seems Broadcom has brought VMWare for their Tanzu platform which is direct competitor of Openshift. It is less about virtualization in corporate data centers which many agree here is legacy business at this point.
martypitt 4y ago
I wonder if this will have knock-on repercussions into the JVM stack, since VMWare owns Pivotal, and Pivotal create Spring.
- ulkesh 4y ago
  Yeah this has me a little concerned, but only a little at this time. The only reason I'm not feeling any major anxiety yet is due to the ubiquity of Spring libraries/frameworks/products. They're everywhere used by thousands of companies, so it would be unlikely that this acquisition would have any dramatic changes for Spring. Perhaps a change in ownership or governance will occur, but hopefully there will be little or no impact.
chrisjc 4y ago
Probably an insignificant detail when considering the entire portfolio of subsidiaries and services under VMWare, but I guess there are some pretty notable projects included in this acquisition. Especially from the Pivotal portfolio such as RabbitMQ, GreenPlum, Spring, Hibernate, etc... although I'm sure most here couldn't care less about Spring related projects.
- martypitt 4y ago
  I do, and this was what sprung to my mind. I feel like Pivotal has been doing a great job lately - especially with Spring. I'd hate to see Broadcomm mess with this, but it feels highly possible.
- zkirill 4y ago
  We are a tiny bootstrapped startup. Spring is critical for us and we rely on RabbitMQ. This news is concerning to say the least.
- gunnarmorling 4y ago
  Hibernate isn't part of the Pivotal portfolio. I'm sure there are contributions by Pivotal employees, but the core Hibernate engineering team is employed by Red Hat, who also own the trademark, etc. Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat and used to be part of the Hibernate team
  - chrisjc 4y ago
    Ah yes, now I recall! I had concerns that Vertx was bundled into that portfolio too, but RH to rescue again.
jka 4y ago
For anyone curious about potential open-source migration options given the prospect of uncertainty around VMware pricing and support: - xcp-ng[1] is a support-available fork of XenServer. Migration[2] can be performed using export to OVA format and subsequent import into the built-in Xen-Orchestra interface. - proxmox-ve[3] provides a management UI for Linux Virtual Machine (LVM) and Linux Containers (LXC) hosts and provides various vendor migration guides[4]. Both commercial and community support[5] is available. - The Xen Hypervisor[6] is capable of hosting x86 and ARM virtual hosts, and their project provides a VMware migration guide[7] [1] - https://xcp-ng.com/ https://xcp-ng.com/ [2] - https://xcp-ng.org/docs/migratetoxcpng.html#from-vmware https://xcp-ng.org/docs/migratetoxcpng.html#from-vmware [3] - https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve [4] - https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox_VE#Virtual-to-Virtual_.28V2V.29 https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox... [5] - https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve/support https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve/support [6] - https://xenproject.org/developers/teams/xen-hypervisor/ https://xenproject.org/developers/teams/xen-hypervisor/ [7] - https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Migration_from_VMware https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Migration_from_VMware
- rwmj 4y ago
  virt-v2v can import VMs from VMware to QEMU/KVM-based systems. https://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v.1.html https://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v.1.html
- CameronNemo 4y ago
  There is also Openstack, oVirt, and LXD (does KVM now).
vkat 4y ago
For anyone who doesn't know, VMware has doubled down in open source in the past 3 years, especially Kubernetes. I don't think Broadcom really understands how investment in open source works or for that matter cares. Half of my org of ~500 engineers works on upstream projects. Disclaimer: Current employee of VMware
- laura2013 4y ago
  I can only hope they let VMware operate independently and continue growing like they've done in the past decade.
  - bobo_legos 4y ago
    One thing that I always gave Dell/EMC credit for was that they at least outwardly seemed to have left VMware free to their own thing. As opposed to a lot of their other acquisitions that they bastardized in this rush to sell enterprises on everything private cloud. We'll see Broadcom ends up taking the same route.
    - vkat 4y ago
      Quite agree, Dell/EMC treated VMware as independent.
  - joedissmeyer 4y ago
    It is best to set your expectations extremely low for this type of acquisition. My personal opinion: Broadcom is _buying_ its way into the Enterprise technology space by hook or crook. When Broadcom acquires a company their M.O. is to immediately install finance-driven leadership and focus strictly on cost cutting measures coupled with accelerated profit-making endeavors. The only thing VMware employees have to look forward to in the near future are layoffs, all types of cost reductions, team consolidations (i.e. you do more work with less resources) and severely reduced R&D. And the only thing that VMware customers have to look forward to are increased VMware costs, more vendor lock-in, reduced satisfaction with support, and almost zero innovation. Again, this is just my opinion so I could end up be wrong. Or maybe I am just in a bad mood today... meh
geodel 4y ago
It is unlikely but if Broadcom boots out SpringBoot and associated crapola from their portfolio, it could be a win for decent developers in this otherwise bad acquisition.
spaintech 4y ago
I have a very different view on this purchase, and I f my thesis is right, then it just might be the best move ever ( Michael Dell has certainly won again with this deal.) Here is my vie, VMware has become the OS of the private cloud. Sure Linux based, but from an enterprise perspective, VMWAre is closer to the HW than any other OS. Considering that Broadcom is a HW company, and that they are looking to fend off Qualcomm, Amd, and Intel as key competitors, should they move to build ARM or RISK-V based server for the enterprise, they could be at a mejor advantage on those CPU architecture. Just a thought from over the pond, but they could buy Ampere and be in that market very well positioned to take in the Enterprise space end to end, they would only need storage if you don’t consider VSAN as a valid solution in that space. Tim will tell.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  It might be the hypervisor and related ecosystem of private cloud today, but I wouldn’t bet $61B on VMWare against the entire field (xen/kvm in Type 1, and all the container solutions) for 2027.
- gmassman 4y ago
  Who's Tim?
  - system2 4y ago
    I believe he meant "Time will tell". Or Tim can come and tell us, up to Tim.
- peeters 4y ago
  I can't say it's not possible, but Broadcom (the corporation, not the semiconductor division within Broadcom) acts more like a holding company. I'd make a comparison to private equity but the goal there is typically to flip the company for a profit. Broadcom's goal is typically to milk high-margin sales for established companies. Purchase, identify the most profitable parts, and cull everything else. Their MO is typically not strategic acquisitions for innovation. If any of their acquisitions can be called strategic it would be in how much the company's top customers align with Broadcom's, which allows them to increase vendor lock-in and jack the price.
didip 4y ago
This deal sounds like it is great for C-suites and investors. I don't know if it's great for the employees. My guess is that there will be a lot of cost cutting moves soon.
meling 4y ago
This could be bad news for all the great researchers that moved to VMware after Microsoft closed their Silicon Valley research division…
1024core 4y ago
One thing I've noticed is that M&A activity really picks up just before a downturn. It's just a gut feeling, I have no data to back it up.
- lostcolony 4y ago
  I mean...how do you define downturn? If you mean recession, as defined by two consecutive quarters of dropping GDP - if GDP drops, stock markets drop. Not sure the directionality there, but the two are usually part and parcel. If stock prices drop, it's a great time for acquisitions if you're sitting on cash. I suspect any time stock markets drop sufficiently, you'll see increased M&A activity, regardless of whether it is prolonged enough to count as a recession.
AcerbicZero 4y ago
I was hoping an independent VMware might recapture some of what it lost during the Dell years, but they still produce a solid product that I generally enjoy working with. Not sure if Broadcom is going to make the situation much better though.
e40 4y ago
I wonder if VMware Fusion will get worse or better, because it got so bad I switched to Parallels. This was after being a customer for a long time.
infogulch 4y ago
It's so sad to see good integrated tech products being bought out just so the market can squeeze it and its customers dry of money, leaving nothing but a dry soulless husk of finance-driven leadership squeezing blood from desperate vendor-locked customers, just so swarms of consultants can move everyone that can afford them off onto the next integrated product to rinse and repeat. The current solution to business management feels suboptimal. If companies are like persons maybe they should be organized with a more integrated 'body', where the 'head' doesn't have total power to sell out the rest of the integrated parts for its own gain. Co-op like organizational structures might avoid this issue, for example.
ricklamers 4y ago
I think this is actually great news. After acquisition the conglomerate level scale will slow innovation. Freeing up opportunity for talented folks to start companies in the space in the areas that are being underserved by Goliath. In addition, these types of deals prove liquidity to financiers creating precedent for financing young upstarts.
system2 4y ago
Can anyone explain how VMware's stock jumped from $90 to $120 on May 23rd before this was announced? How did people know this was going to happen 3 days before anyone of us heard of it?
- ComradePhil 4y ago
  Insider trading... but the very people who are supposed to be preventing this are involved in thr same thing all the time.
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    There are various stages of this beyond the plain illegal. Some people watch secondary signs like private plane travel data, for example.
- garaetjjte 4y ago
  It's been reported before: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-22/broadcom-said-to-be-in-talks-to-acquire-vmware https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-22/broadcom-...
- rospaya 4y ago
  There were rumours around, I think I even saw them on HN.

596 points by squidofbits 4y ago

ajaxnet 4y ago

RIP Spring

TradingPlaces 4y ago

Opinion: VMWare’s customer’s will loudly object to the FTC and this will not happen.

drumhead 4y ago

I gather they own Symantec as well, how did that go for them? $61bn is a full price to be paying at this stage of the market.

gertrunde 4y ago
I've no idea how well the Symantec acquisition worked for Broadcom, but it was particularly painful for anyone using Symantec products. The ordering/renewal process was so messed up by the transition that for approximately 18 months it was almost impossible to get a quote or place an order, even to renew an existing subscription, long enough that Symantec started just giving out subscription extensions to tide people over until the order process worked again.

whalesalad 4y ago

VMWare is being passed around like the village bicycle.

EarthIsHome 4y ago
Holy crap! Look at these acquisitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware#Acquisitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware#Acquisitions
- mkl 4y ago
  Those are companies that VMware acquired, not companies that acquired VMware.
  - EarthIsHome 4y ago
    Whoops! Totally misunderstood that page. Thanks for pointing it out.

formerly_proven 4y ago

Can we like... stop building these ginormous conglomerates? Thanks.

ReactiveJelly 4y ago
If intellectual property (specifically software patents) were weakened, this would be less of a problem, right? Companies don't buy companies, they buy IP, as I understand it.
- alberth 4y ago
  Consolidation in mature markets inevitably happens.
  - nousermane 4y ago
    ...absent functioning antitrust legislation, yes.
    - streblo 4y ago
      Is there an antitrust case to be made here? Antitrust means a lot more than just 'big company'.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - nicoburns 4y ago
        You seem to be asking if there is a case within current legislation. Whereas the parent is suggesting that more cases ought to be covered by future stricter legislation (which could at least in principle be as simple as "big company").
        mc32 4y ago
        So you put a cap in it, what happens, mitosis? I’m not sure it would have that big of an effect. It would certainly help in some areas like search and social networks though.

SSLy 4y ago

Oh no https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/uxucz4/if_vmware_is_acquired_by_broadcom_run_and_do_not/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/uxucz4/if_vm...

nwatson 4y ago
Yep, that's Broadcom's business model ... buy a business (VMWare), ignore its smaller customers, upsell the Fortune 500 on the product (VMWare) to push out competing solutions, and keep the line items on those Fortune 500 bills growing. It's worked for them I guess. I left a Broadcom acquisition before the takeover.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- devonkim 4y ago
  It’s kind of par for the entire enterprise market as a whole similar to the structural problems of b2b companies. SMBs are hard to serve effectively and the margins are slim, so you’ll see companies that are b2b move more toward SMB b2b (see: Best Buy although Apple is the clear exception here). Everyone chases the big accounts because the model is less risky no different than how there’s no shortage of luxury homes being built.
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
Why wouldn't you just post to the article directly, and bypass the horrible Reddit web site for the redirect?
- cruano 4y ago
  Because the reddit post was also made by the author ? And he's responding to the comments there too?
  - TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
    Fair enough.

SemanticStrengh 4y ago

If they invested instead a mere Billion into optimizing a fork of e.g. QEMU they would destroy VMware in performance.

VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
right but they wouldn't be able to own qemu. that's what they want
mbreese 4y ago
This isn’t about the hypervisor. This is about the enterprise sales. A bank isn’t going to run their data center on qemu, regardless of the performance. They are going to go with the company that can sell them support contracts with dedicated engineers to answer the phone.
- wyldfire 4y ago
  > They are going to go with the company that can sell them support contracts with dedicated engineers to answer the phone. There's no reason the company selling them support couldn't be providing support for QEMU btw. If it met their needs otherwise I'm sure they'd consider it.
- mountainriver 4y ago
  Yup as a former employee I can confirm this is not about the hypervisor although vmw has a good hypervisor, it’s about everything auxiliary to that
- bluGill 4y ago
  Big companies are starting to learn that free open source can be supported in house, in some cases it is even cheaper, but in others the flexibility of being in control of when a much needed by only you feature is developed is a big deal. Open source also is never acquired and the price jacked up to beyond the worth but they are forced to pay the price anyway because they can't get off before their license expires.
  - 4y ago

mysterydip 4y ago

"to speed up its expansion into the enterprise software business." Why does a chipmaker want/need to expand into enterprise software? Shouldn't they be expanding to making different chips?

nikanj 4y ago
Because they want something that’s not affected by the chip shortage.
- xadhominemx 4y ago
  No, that is just incorrect. Please don’t speculate if you don’t know what you’re talking about.
  - sitkack 4y ago
    I think you misunderstand the point of HN, that is basically the only thing that occurs here.
    - xadhominemx 4y ago
      I know, but if someone just flat out makes something up I’d hope they’d hedge their language a little bit.
  - strunz 4y ago
    This was reported by multiple financial news organizations, what makes you so confident it isn't true?
    - xadhominemx 4y ago
      I am very confident this is not true. I am certain I know Broadcom’s corporate strategy and views on the semi cycle better than any financial journalist.
BoGs83 4y ago

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boeingUH60 4y ago

Michael Dell will get $24bn! from this acquisition...It's fascinating how he turned around a struggling PC company (Dell Inc) into a financial engineering machine that made him tens of billions. https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/04/18/how-wall-streets-greatest-piece-of-financial-engineering-propelled-michael-dell-to-a-50-billion-fortune/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/04/18/how-wall...

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Apocryphon 4y ago
So he Jack Welched his own corporation?
- papito 4y ago
  Jack Welch and his students turned companies into steaming piles of crap, not gold. GE, Boeing. A few people walk away with riches, however.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Good to hear that Dell’s schemes haven’t done the same to his own company. Would it be more accurate to draw a comparison to Masa Son? An entrepreneur in tech who ended up playing high stakes financial games with his company’s own money.
    - papito 4y ago
      No one is as much of a gambler as Masa Son. Masa is not particularly evil or scheming - he is just nuts.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    The Koolaid at Motorola was that they invented six sigma. Throw that on the fire too.
4y ago

brycewray 4y ago

Would guess they’re high-fiving at Parallels right now.

travisgriggs 4y ago
I’ve been going back and forth every few years between Fusion and || Desktop. I’m currently on a || swing. I guess I’ll be staying here for a while.
temac 4y ago
VMWare Fusion on M1 was already way behind (to an absurd point: it has been > 1 year 1/2 after the M1 launch, and VMWare has not yet launched a release of Fusion for it, only betas, and they do not target Windows). Overwhelming most of VMWare business is about other products anyway.

monkey_monkey 4y ago

Do these type of transactions ever end up well for either the acquirer or the acquired company?

normac2 4y ago
I think Trello and Atlassian went well (massively different scale, though). I think the rep is that Atlassian mainly does well by leaving the companies alone as independent organizations, more like investment positions rather than actually merging the tech.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
Yes. See Oracle. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/market-cap https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/market...
- the_only_law 4y ago
  Not fair to compare software companies to a law firm.
bombcar 4y ago
EMC bought VMware for $650 million and Dell bought EMC for $74 billion and now sold VMware for $61 billion so it worked out for someone.
- ghaff 4y ago
  The EMC purchase of VMware was probably one of the best tech acquisitions of all time. At least financially. You can reasonably argue whether VMware's overall trajectory was better or worse as a result; in any case, most of the original leadership team ended up departing.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Someone knew something - that's an insanely low valuation for a major player in the (then just starting) virtualization market. But at the time virtualization was considered as something "to keep that old Windows NT server/software running" - not foundational for all cloud services ever.

acd 4y ago

Ponders if it will payoff as an investment. Hyper visors are nowdays commodity. Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite datacenters to the cloud. Hyperscalers AWS,Google and Azure running the cloud are running work loads on Linux KVM kernel based virtual machines.

kasey_junk 4y ago
I was under the impression each of those had custom hypervisors? While perhaps still Linux that doesn’t seem like a commodity.
- sithadmin 4y ago
  They're 'custom', but are heavily derivative of KVM in the case of AWS (Nitro) and GCP. Azure runs a fork of Hyper-V, AFAIK.
- wildfire 4y ago
  AWS' Hypervisor is Nitro. Which is based upon KVM - AIUI. https://www.kovarus.com/blog/deep-dive-into-the-aws-nitro-system/ https://www.kovarus.com/blog/deep-dive-into-the-aws-nitro-sy...
mountainriver 4y ago
Not a fan of vmware (I used to work there) but pretty much no one currently can compete with VMware’s full product line and optimizations
iKevinShah 4y ago
VMware used to be centered around Virtualization until 2015-16 or so. Since then it has moved / expanded to Software defined Datacenters (technically virtualization, yes), Automation, Security (Carbon Black) and lately, K8s (with Tanzu). That does not mean a good chunk of revenue might still be from virtualization - FWIW, I do not have any idea on that. Disclaimer: I am an ex-employee of VMware.
voidfunc 4y ago
Azure uses Hyper-V under the hood not kvm. Its also not built on Linux.

unabridged 4y ago

Enterprise software is such a mystery to me. I can't imagine any company ran by <40 yr olds ever paying $100k+ a year to VMWare, Symantec, Oracle, ... To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly

ghc 4y ago
Just for a second, imagine a company that isn't a software company, but needs software to run its business. Think manufacturing, logistics, shipping, construction, food (industrial scale egg production, for example) etc. There's a lot of companies like that out there...in fact it's almost all of them. Those companies run all their boring, essential software (accounting, ERPs, etc.) on VMWare, Oracle, Azure, etc. Since software isn't their core business, they pay an external company to keep their software running. Like it or not, cloud providers are for software companies, and most companies have no interest in becoming a software company. They might have some small groups that do analytics or software in-house, and those groups might use cloud providers, but all the essential software will be run by a company you can call when something breaks, or if you're big enough embeds some staff in your office. It's just good sense to outsource non-core functions. Software companies outsource hosting and datacenter stuff to AWS, etc. Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly?
- nousermane 4y ago
  Exactly. Most "enterprise" software competes with a team of 3 doing it all in excel. At this rate, $100k/yr is a bargain.
  - foobiekr 4y ago
    When people talk enterprise they are talking 2000+ person companies. They are not doing their ERP payroll etc using excel.
  - FredPret 4y ago
    I do ERP and the thought of replicating it in Excel… yikes. For a big company you’ll need a team of hundreds and a huge surplus of sanity, and you’ll still have a worse outcome. An ERP is basically a database with an interface with business logic built in. Certainly not something you want to do in Excel.

caymanjim 4y ago

I didn't know VMware was still a thing. What do they even do? Who uses any of it?

sithadmin 4y ago
VMware has the largest on-premises hypervisor footprint by a large margin and sells a zillion other software products to layer on top. Pretty much every large public company has a VMware footprint in their data center, and frequently have their entire on-prem infrastructure built on top of vSphere.
- caymanjim 4y ago
  Fair enough. I could have googled it. I live in a bubble of Linux and AWS/other cloud services, so this sort of thing isn't part of my world.
jodrellblank 4y ago
You can get three Dell servers and a VMware install ISO and have a hypervisor with a web interface, a distributed cluster filesystem replicating between the nodes, VM failover in case of hardware failure, live migration of VMs between nodes for maintenance (state and/or storage), a centralised update system, VLAN aware guest networking, isolated management networking, all up and running in production in half a day - less if you someone has already opened the boxes and racked it all up before hand. Without any great technical skills needed to setup any of it. With a bit more planning and a larger environment and more licensing, and not much more tech skills, you'll have redundant trunked network links, it will migrate VMs between nodes to balance load, integrate with the node IPMI management to power hosts down when the load is light and power them on when the load increases, and for enough money on licensing it will keep two VMs on different host nodes in sync down to the CPU instruction in case one host fails nobody will notice. Also with not much tech skills. And when I say "not much tech skills" you do need to understand enough about computing to plan it and cable things in properly and deal with VLANs and subnets and ISOs and DNS, routing, and VMware's way of doing networking, and the basics. But you need to know approximately nothing about /etc/ or XML or YAML, cluster quorums, elections, filesystem locking, heartbeat or watchdog services, distributed consensus protocols, package management, LVM, systemd, hypervisor subsystems, PAM modules, Kerberos, webservers, databases, Unix permissions, or etc. I'm under no illusions that it's cheap, or bug-free, or that you never need to SSH in and poke it ever, or that it's the right thing for every task, or that it's the modern way. But it's an amazing packaging up of a lot of things into a worldbeating product, and its integration with Dell specifically - Dell hosts, Dell EMC storage - is such a good fit that makes me surprised and sad that Dell would sell VMware.

DebtDeflation 4y ago

Not sure I understand the expected synergies here. Broadcom's main business is making embedded chips for networking and storage devices. Is this just a pure diversification play?

dralley 4y ago
>Is this just a pure diversification play? Probably. 6 months ago they were looking at acquiring SAS (which didn't go anywhere). The core competencies for that of those companies are even less related to what Broadcom does.
MangoCoffee 4y ago
yes consider Broadcom bought Symantec.

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

I don't understand the stock market. VMW at $50B market cap equates to ~$120 per share. The Broadcom acquisition is for ~20% more, and yet, the stock price is at $120, not... $145 or something. Can someone more financially literate (or with direct experience in the stock market) explain this discrepancy to me? (comment made at ~9:33am ET, stock market opened a few minutes ago)

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phonon 4y ago
"Under the terms of the agreement, which has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies, VMware shareholders will elect to receive either $142.50 in cash or 0.2520 shares of Broadcom common stock for each VMware share. The shareholder election will be subject to proration, resulting in approximately 50% of VMware’s shares being exchanged for cash consideration and 50% being exchanged for Broadcom common stock. Based on the closing price of Broadcom common stock on May 25, 2022, the total $138.23 per-share consideration represents a 44% premium to the closing price of VMware common stock on May 20, 2022, the last trading day prior to media speculation regarding a potential transaction, and a 32% premium to VMware’s unaffected 30-day volume weighted average price (VWAP). Upon closing of the transaction, based on the outstanding shares of each company as of the date hereof, current Broadcom shareholders will own approximately 88% and current VMware shareholders will own approximately 12% of the combined company on a fully diluted basis. " [1] 1. The deal might not go through, or the terms might change. 2. You might not be able to get 100% cash for your shares. [1] https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/company/vmware-broadcom.pdf https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/e...
dodobirdlord 4y ago
If the stock is trading at $120/share that means everyone who owns stock (and is paying attention and offering it for sale) won’t sell for less than $120. But that doesn’t mean all of them, or even most of them, would sell for $120. Many of them probably believe their stock should be worth more than $120 and expect the price to go up in the future. So if you want to buy out the whole company you have to pitch a price high enough that a majority of shareholders (or the board of directors as their fiduciary proxy) agree to sell at that price. This is basically guaranteed to be a substantially higher price than whatever the current market price is, because if the average shareholder didn’t expect the stock price to go up, why are they holding shares? As the deal becomes increasingly likely to go through, the stock price will likely gradually shift up to match the deal price.

geodel 4y ago

So far I have only used Automic Automation from Broadcom. I found it supremely crappy. Its UI brings back memory of (I guess now defunct) IBM Websphere. But it is now an "Enterprise Solution" so it has to shoved down developer's throat with full force. Just like analysts said IBM brought RedHat mainly for Openshift platform and I think there is some truth to it. Seems Broadcom has brought VMWare for their Tanzu platform which is direct competitor of Openshift. It is less about virtualization in corporate data centers which many agree here is legacy business at this point.

martypitt 4y ago

I wonder if this will have knock-on repercussions into the JVM stack, since VMWare owns Pivotal, and Pivotal create Spring.

ulkesh 4y ago
Yeah this has me a little concerned, but only a little at this time. The only reason I'm not feeling any major anxiety yet is due to the ubiquity of Spring libraries/frameworks/products. They're everywhere used by thousands of companies, so it would be unlikely that this acquisition would have any dramatic changes for Spring. Perhaps a change in ownership or governance will occur, but hopefully there will be little or no impact.

chrisjc 4y ago

Probably an insignificant detail when considering the entire portfolio of subsidiaries and services under VMWare, but I guess there are some pretty notable projects included in this acquisition. Especially from the Pivotal portfolio such as RabbitMQ, GreenPlum, Spring, Hibernate, etc... although I'm sure most here couldn't care less about Spring related projects.

martypitt 4y ago
I do, and this was what sprung to my mind. I feel like Pivotal has been doing a great job lately - especially with Spring. I'd hate to see Broadcomm mess with this, but it feels highly possible.
zkirill 4y ago
We are a tiny bootstrapped startup. Spring is critical for us and we rely on RabbitMQ. This news is concerning to say the least.
gunnarmorling 4y ago
Hibernate isn't part of the Pivotal portfolio. I'm sure there are contributions by Pivotal employees, but the core Hibernate engineering team is employed by Red Hat, who also own the trademark, etc. Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat and used to be part of the Hibernate team
- chrisjc 4y ago
  Ah yes, now I recall! I had concerns that Vertx was bundled into that portfolio too, but RH to rescue again.

jka 4y ago

For anyone curious about potential open-source migration options given the prospect of uncertainty around VMware pricing and support: - xcp-ng[1] is a support-available fork of XenServer. Migration[2] can be performed using export to OVA format and subsequent import into the built-in Xen-Orchestra interface. - proxmox-ve[3] provides a management UI for Linux Virtual Machine (LVM) and Linux Containers (LXC) hosts and provides various vendor migration guides[4]. Both commercial and community support[5] is available. - The Xen Hypervisor[6] is capable of hosting x86 and ARM virtual hosts, and their project provides a VMware migration guide[7] [1] - https://xcp-ng.com/ https://xcp-ng.com/ [2] - https://xcp-ng.org/docs/migratetoxcpng.html#from-vmware https://xcp-ng.org/docs/migratetoxcpng.html#from-vmware [3] - https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve [4] - https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox_VE#Virtual-to-Virtual_.28V2V.29 https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox... [5] - https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve/support https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve/support [6] - https://xenproject.org/developers/teams/xen-hypervisor/ https://xenproject.org/developers/teams/xen-hypervisor/ [7] - https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Migration_from_VMware https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Migration_from_VMware

rwmj 4y ago
virt-v2v can import VMs from VMware to QEMU/KVM-based systems. https://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v.1.html https://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v.1.html
CameronNemo 4y ago
There is also Openstack, oVirt, and LXD (does KVM now).

vkat 4y ago

For anyone who doesn't know, VMware has doubled down in open source in the past 3 years, especially Kubernetes. I don't think Broadcom really understands how investment in open source works or for that matter cares. Half of my org of ~500 engineers works on upstream projects. Disclaimer: Current employee of VMware

laura2013 4y ago
I can only hope they let VMware operate independently and continue growing like they've done in the past decade.
- bobo_legos 4y ago
  One thing that I always gave Dell/EMC credit for was that they at least outwardly seemed to have left VMware free to their own thing. As opposed to a lot of their other acquisitions that they bastardized in this rush to sell enterprises on everything private cloud. We'll see Broadcom ends up taking the same route.
  - vkat 4y ago
    Quite agree, Dell/EMC treated VMware as independent.
- joedissmeyer 4y ago
  It is best to set your expectations extremely low for this type of acquisition. My personal opinion: Broadcom is _buying_ its way into the Enterprise technology space by hook or crook. When Broadcom acquires a company their M.O. is to immediately install finance-driven leadership and focus strictly on cost cutting measures coupled with accelerated profit-making endeavors. The only thing VMware employees have to look forward to in the near future are layoffs, all types of cost reductions, team consolidations (i.e. you do more work with less resources) and severely reduced R&D. And the only thing that VMware customers have to look forward to are increased VMware costs, more vendor lock-in, reduced satisfaction with support, and almost zero innovation. Again, this is just my opinion so I could end up be wrong. Or maybe I am just in a bad mood today... meh

geodel 4y ago

It is unlikely but if Broadcom boots out SpringBoot and associated crapola from their portfolio, it could be a win for decent developers in this otherwise bad acquisition.

spaintech 4y ago

I have a very different view on this purchase, and I f my thesis is right, then it just might be the best move ever ( Michael Dell has certainly won again with this deal.) Here is my vie, VMware has become the OS of the private cloud. Sure Linux based, but from an enterprise perspective, VMWAre is closer to the HW than any other OS. Considering that Broadcom is a HW company, and that they are looking to fend off Qualcomm, Amd, and Intel as key competitors, should they move to build ARM or RISK-V based server for the enterprise, they could be at a mejor advantage on those CPU architecture. Just a thought from over the pond, but they could buy Ampere and be in that market very well positioned to take in the Enterprise space end to end, they would only need storage if you don’t consider VSAN as a valid solution in that space. Tim will tell.

sokoloff 4y ago
It might be the hypervisor and related ecosystem of private cloud today, but I wouldn’t bet $61B on VMWare against the entire field (xen/kvm in Type 1, and all the container solutions) for 2027.
gmassman 4y ago
Who's Tim?
- system2 4y ago
  I believe he meant "Time will tell". Or Tim can come and tell us, up to Tim.
peeters 4y ago
I can't say it's not possible, but Broadcom (the corporation, not the semiconductor division within Broadcom) acts more like a holding company. I'd make a comparison to private equity but the goal there is typically to flip the company for a profit. Broadcom's goal is typically to milk high-margin sales for established companies. Purchase, identify the most profitable parts, and cull everything else. Their MO is typically not strategic acquisitions for innovation. If any of their acquisitions can be called strategic it would be in how much the company's top customers align with Broadcom's, which allows them to increase vendor lock-in and jack the price.

didip 4y ago

This deal sounds like it is great for C-suites and investors. I don't know if it's great for the employees. My guess is that there will be a lot of cost cutting moves soon.

meling 4y ago

This could be bad news for all the great researchers that moved to VMware after Microsoft closed their Silicon Valley research division…

1024core 4y ago

One thing I've noticed is that M&A activity really picks up just before a downturn. It's just a gut feeling, I have no data to back it up.

lostcolony 4y ago
I mean...how do you define downturn? If you mean recession, as defined by two consecutive quarters of dropping GDP - if GDP drops, stock markets drop. Not sure the directionality there, but the two are usually part and parcel. If stock prices drop, it's a great time for acquisitions if you're sitting on cash. I suspect any time stock markets drop sufficiently, you'll see increased M&A activity, regardless of whether it is prolonged enough to count as a recession.

AcerbicZero 4y ago

I was hoping an independent VMware might recapture some of what it lost during the Dell years, but they still produce a solid product that I generally enjoy working with. Not sure if Broadcom is going to make the situation much better though.

e40 4y ago

I wonder if VMware Fusion will get worse or better, because it got so bad I switched to Parallels. This was after being a customer for a long time.

infogulch 4y ago

It's so sad to see good integrated tech products being bought out just so the market can squeeze it and its customers dry of money, leaving nothing but a dry soulless husk of finance-driven leadership squeezing blood from desperate vendor-locked customers, just so swarms of consultants can move everyone that can afford them off onto the next integrated product to rinse and repeat. The current solution to business management feels suboptimal. If companies are like persons maybe they should be organized with a more integrated 'body', where the 'head' doesn't have total power to sell out the rest of the integrated parts for its own gain. Co-op like organizational structures might avoid this issue, for example.

ricklamers 4y ago

I think this is actually great news. After acquisition the conglomerate level scale will slow innovation. Freeing up opportunity for talented folks to start companies in the space in the areas that are being underserved by Goliath. In addition, these types of deals prove liquidity to financiers creating precedent for financing young upstarts.

system2 4y ago

Can anyone explain how VMware's stock jumped from $90 to $120 on May 23rd before this was announced? How did people know this was going to happen 3 days before anyone of us heard of it?

ComradePhil 4y ago
Insider trading... but the very people who are supposed to be preventing this are involved in thr same thing all the time.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  There are various stages of this beyond the plain illegal. Some people watch secondary signs like private plane travel data, for example.
garaetjjte 4y ago
It's been reported before: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-22/broadcom-said-to-be-in-talks-to-acquire-vmware https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-22/broadcom-...
rospaya 4y ago
There were rumours around, I think I even saw them on HN.