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>I wonder which corporate overlord will take it over in the next 4-5 years. There will be no next. Broadcom will get blood from the stone, rest assured. They
by tw04 3y ago
>I wonder which corporate overlord will take it over in the next 4-5 years.
There will be no next. Broadcom will get blood from the stone, rest assured. They will continue to raise maintenance and licensing fees until they very last customer turns off their last ESXi box. If you think IBM and mainframe is bad, you've never lived with a technology that Broadcom has acquired.
- MrDrMcCoy 3y ago100%. I still have contacts from when I worked there, and It's worse than feared. Everything is on fire and all the best engineering/support talent has either left or is leaving. Broadcom is not only raising prices, but is set to deliver considerably worse products. It makes me sad, because it was once an incredible place to work. Now I recommend that people avoid them like the plague.
- darkclouds 3y ago[dead]
- kelnos 3y agoIncredible place to work or not, I recall at least as far back as 2004 they were terrible from a B2B support standpoint. Impossible to get help with buggy drivers, everything opaque and poorly documented. And don't get me started on trying to get their chipsets working on Linux. Up until recently, it was nearly as bad as nvidia's garbage. Even now, I'm not sure if everything is well supported; I've avoided BRCM wifi like the plague for years now.
- Angostura 3y agoI think the commenter may have been referring to VMWare rather than Broadcom.
- junon 3y agoThis is indeed sad. VMware was some of the best at one point. In my opinion, it still sort of is.
- xyst 3y agoNever heard of Broadcom. Are they like the private equity of tech? Kind of sounds like it.
- inputError 3y ago[dead]
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoYou almost certainly have Broadcom in your pocket.
- latchkey 3y agoThese bits absolutely traveled through a Broadcom NIC.
- Cyph0n 3y agoAs someone who worked on SP routers at Cisco - yes to the above.
- networkchad 3y ago[dead]
- ikiris 3y agoMuch to the regret of anyone trying to manage them. Cheap is nice, but I miss the days when chips did things you wanted.
- zaat 3y agoSome other bits were silently discarded by same Broadcom NIC, no particular reason given and no event wasn't registered
- latchkey 3y agoThankfully we have TCP retransmission.
- lokar 3y agoThey have actually been pretty open that this is the plan. And all the secondary products and small customers can wither away even faster.
- notacoward 3y agoIBM? Try EMC or Cisco. I ended up at the former by acquisition; many friends ended up at the second likewise. AFAICT they both have much worse records of turning acquisitions into abandonware than IBM does (not that IBM's is great). Oracle and Microsoft have already been mentioned, but Intel deserves a place on that horrible list too. Tech has been full of such fat and lazy predators for a long time.
- rammer 3y agoAnother perfect example of a large company acquiring and killing the support and the product is Intuit"s acquisition of Tsheets. And more recently the working progress which is Intuit's acquisition of MailChimp.
- steve1977 3y agoEMC already had their go at VMware ;)
- Unfrozen0688 3y agoCisco has done well with Meraki and Duo, no?
- eskaytwo 3y agoThey deliberately kept them at arms length to protect the brand value
- manicennui 3y agoIs there a single large tech company that doesn't fuck over the customers of their acquisitions?
- SSLy 3y agoHPE?
- crest 3y agoThey even fuck over their own customers by locking away documentation and firmware updates behind a support contract paywall.
- pjmlp 3y agoSadly, I have wasted many hours reading HP-UX documentation, and also hunting the Modula-2+ and Modula-3 papers, as per Compaq and DEC Olivetti acquisitions.
- flopsamjetsam 3y ago> hunting the Modula-2+ and Modula-3 papers, as per Compaq and DEC Olivetti acquisitions The programming languages? What's the story there, were they acquired?
- johnvanommen 3y ago> They even fuck over their own customers by locking away documentation and firmware updates behind a support contract paywall. I used to work for HPE on their OpenStack team, and getting support, even as an employee, basically required me to have a rolodex full of engineers all over the world. A tremendous amount of troubleshooting was just looking up who had committed code, then tracking them down when something blew up.
- ronsor 3y agoAs of late, probably Microsoft does it the least, unintuitively enough.
- factormeta 3y ago>They will continue to raise maintenance and licensing fees until they very last customer turns off their last ESXi box hmm, why would people still use VMWare? Honest question. Maybe there are some licensing issues I'm not aware of. Isn't vbox open source? If not, wouldn't even things such as https://copy.sh/v86/ https://copy.sh/v86/ in the browser would do most virtualization trick now days?
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y agoEdit: the following statement is incorrect and retracted: ‘Virtualbox is not free for commercial use iirc’ Esxi is an enterprise product which engineers are familiar with, the cost of the product vs the cost of migration and upskilling in alternative tech should not be underestimated, particularly when it’s the thing that runs all your other things. Edit: in case you’re not aware, many organisations still leverage on-prem virtualisation technologies - that might not be obvious to people that haven’t seen it.
- p3n1s 3y agoVirtualbox is GPL licensed. Only the extension packs are non GPL. In any case virtualbox competes with VMWare player/Workstation/fusion which we all should know is not their core business.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- barkingcat 3y agomost people don't use vmware the way you use virtualbox. The money making part of vmware licensing is the baremetal hypervisor ESXi, the competitors are xen or hyperv and the likes. The lock-in part of vmware is the vsphere management software, that allows you to move VM's en mass from one baremetal machine to another baremetal machine, or allows you to nest vm's, etc. manage your entire fleet of vm's which could be thousands or hundreds of thousands of virtual machines, from one management interface. it's basically docker except it's actual entire vm's being moved around. VMWare ESXi being a baremetal hypervisor means you can run different OS's on top of these vm's and imagine being able to move these VM's all running different OS's around in your ecosystem. That's what people pay the big bucks to vmware for. It would be very difficult to build the vsphere/esxi ecosystem with pure opensource tools (it's possible with Xen, etc) but you'd be right back at paying some vendor a massive amount of money for building, integrating, and supporting this kind of system. (Redhat will happily sell you something that approximates vmware's tools, for megabucks). As an aside, the consumer "vmware" software that you install on your workstation is such a small portion of their business, they basically spend no money on fixing/upkeeping. Apple silicon support was in beta for a loooong time, and they don't actually care about their workstation product. ESXi makes the money.
- Spooky23 3y agoYup. Broadcom is the CA of our era.
- thedougd 3y agoYes, and they even bought CA.
- mergy 3y agoCA = Computer Associates for the youngsters.
- elbear 3y agoThank you!
- taskforcegemini 3y agothank you, was thinking Certificate Authority
- unethical_ban 3y agoOh God... that's what the CA in CA Spectrum was? One. NEW. CRITICAL. Alarm.
- rr808 3y agoWeird I used to use broadcom chips decades ago. My new job uses Autosys - by Broadcom wtf?
- worewood 3y agoLiterally, since they acquired them.
- Spooky23 3y agoLol. I didn't realize that. The product i used to use from CA years ago was sold to another tech necromancer - Attachmate. I thought CA was part of whatever shitshow acquired them! :)
- raincom 3y agoMaybe, Broadcom's strategy is 'to raise maintenance and licensing fees until they very last customer turns off their last ESXi box'. Broadcom spent $69B to acquire VMWare. They just need to squeeze blood for another 10 years. VMware's revenue for 2022 is $13B, and net income about $1.8B. Trim sales department, remove duplication(HR, IT, etc), cut down development, remove many make-work projects that the middle management engages in, increase licensing/support cost. They will focus more on net income, financing costs for $69B will be taken care of by layoffs and other stuff.
- snapplebobapple 3y agoPretty much this. I wish proxmox would get off their butts and release a better management setup to deal with multisite, as I would love to complete the move to their product for our last remaining vmware systems.
- iforgotpassword 3y agoTbh I was really surprised how Workstation still got major updates after that news from 2ish years ago where they fired the whole team working on that and moved its development to India . It already seemed like they wanted to focus on the core business of ESX and switch workstation to maintenance mode, but no, we for example got major improvements in 3D pass-through, like Vulkan and d3d10/11 support.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoSimple: there's devs in India who can code well and not every Western developer is an irreplaceable John Carmack so not every offshoring story ends badly.
- traceroute66 3y ago> Simple: there's devs in India who can code well Sure, without a doubt, there are exellent devs to be found worldwide. But let's face the reality ... Western corporates don't go outsourcing in India for the talent. They go outsourcing in India because they want to wield the axe on what they perceive as the expense of Western developers. So, if they're not willing to pay Western developers, they're not exactly going to be looking at the premium end of the Indian talent pool either are they ! Especially as a typical remuneration structure for senior management is that you are rewarded with a bonus based on the amount of cost-cutting you've achieved.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>So, if they're not willing to pay Western developers, they're not exactly going to be looking at the premium end of the Indian talent pool either are they! I beg to differ. You're either ignorant or have no idea how many SW and HW you interact with regularly from big name companies, has been through the hands of skilled Indian or other offshore devs which while being cheaper than American devs, are in now way worse programmers, sometimes the opposite. You seem to equate pay only with talent and skill, but that's rarely the case. Lower paid international devs aren't necessarily worse than their American counterparts and well paid American devs aren't always better than international talent. Your pay is more a function of opportunities and supply/demand in your area rather then purely on your own skills. Otherwise explain me how the same international devs who struggle to crack 50k in their own developing country can suddenly score 200k+ the moment they're in the American labor market. They don't magically become 4x better coders the moment they cross the border.
- m-p-3 3y agoThey also acquired Symantec. When you think a product can't get any worse..
- lhoff 3y agoFunnily enough, I know of two instances where companies got rid of their mainframe driven by the license cost for Gen[1] which was bought by Broadcom in 2020. I heard they were only issuing 5 year licenses now. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Gen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Gen
- tech_tuna 3y agoAWS, Azure and GCP are going to see some growth from this. If you were an ESX customer and needed a good reason to finally embrace the cloud - here it is.