[newsclues]

Why wait? Just do it and deal with the ill effects as soon as possible.

This way they get to slash costs with less staff and effectively fire the clients they don’t want.

They expect backlash and thinks it’s worth the cost, because they plan on milking the remaining customers asap.

[mixdup]

But they're cutting off customers who have paid and are under contracts

I'm not talking about ripping off the bandaid on the new sales channels, I'm talking about the fact that customers who have active licenses they've paid for can no longer activate them because they've shut these systems down

That inevitably is going to lead to a class action against them

[newsclues]

They have budgeted for lawsuits and don’t care. It’s a feature not a bug to get rid of clients who won’t be milked to the bone.

[mixdup]

I am suspicious that they even thought about it that far. There's no way it's cheaper to let the active customers sue them rather than just leave the license activation servers up

[iforgotpassword]

How does that make sense? Had they chosen a slow gratuitous path those customers might've switched to other products, now they've been burned and will think twice before choosing VMware again.

[alphager]

Vmware is dead. They don't plan to acquire new customers (or invest a cent in research& development). The purpose of this whole thing is to milk those fortune 500 companies that are too entrenched to migrate away.

[api]

Ahh the grand BigCo tradition of acquiring a company and then setting fire to it.

[sofixa]

> They expect backlash and thinks it’s worth the cost, because they plan on milking the remaining customers asap.

Why would they think that after that disaster said customers will still be with them? I no longer have the displeasure of being a VMware customer, but if I saw what they're currently doing while jacking up prices and trimming support, what possible reason would there be to remain as a customer? Inertia? At some point you know the bill will be too high, so might as well move before it gets too bad.

VMware will end up like Symantec or similar, a shell of a company that people know of, but nobody actually uses on purpose.

[alphager]

That's the whole plan. They basically only want to retain the fortune 500 customers and wing them dry. Anybody that can migrate away will do so, but the rest will be taken to the cleaners.

[The_Colonel]

There's little competition in some of VMWare's segments and even if there is, the migration is long, expensive and risky.