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> "To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly"

You can see people spending millions of dollars a year to keep from having to deal with Linux as evidence that they are stupid. Or you can see it as evidence that Linux really is that bad. It works both ways.

VMware gives you a thing people can be trained on and certified on, a brand you can hire for and screen resumes on, a consistent environment which behaves in a predictable way that you really can turn employees into replacable cogs. Any helpdesk or admin employee can deal with VMware, any MSP, any tech recruiter, and a lot of training companies. You can get backup systems which "support VMware" and storage which integrates with VMware snapshots, and reporting tools which work with VMware.

It's almost not about the tech at all, it's about how do you build companies on shifting sands? You define interfaces for components which can be plugged together. "VMware" is an API or interface that the business can work to; vendors can say "deploy this OVF to VMware", sales can say to the business "this thing we need works with VMware" or to the customers "we can work with your VMware" or "our offering is trustworthy because we use VMware" and the customer recognises the name. HR can say "we need to hire people who know VMware" and that means something fairly specific to the wider world. "runs on Linux" and "people who know Linux" are wildly, wildly, variable and vague things which could mean "ran a website, minimum wage" or "turns SELinux off to make things run" or "was SRE for FAANG" or "did a PHD in AI for tuning networking stacks in HPC applications but doesn't know anything else".

You make software by defining interfaces and components that can be plugged together to make larger systems. Brands are that, for tech. Like you hire someone who "knows React" not someone who "is a programmer" because that's too vague and is as likely to get you someone who worked on a Java CRUD program or someone who worked on a Python log analyser. Like you hire a "service delivery manager" or a "customer account manager" and not "an employee".