The fallacy here is that you’re ignoring the pipeline. The next generation of infrastructure admins are either running on all cloud, or running on something the

The fallacy here is that you’re ignoring the pipeline. The next generation of infrastructure admins are either running on all cloud, or running on something they can easily access like any KVM based system (like proxmox). VMware is instantly a legacy system because anyone who doesn’t already run it isn’t going to bother learning it. Revenue generating or not, the free platforms are will generate more revenue than VMware at such and exorbitant cost.