[Rinzler89]

And when they'll become whales they'll call Broadcom since scrappy start-up aren't gonna keep acting like scrappy start-ups when they reach whale scale.

That's how major semiconductor companies operate. They'll only talk to you if you're a whale promising to buy volumes worth millions, they're not gonna waste time talking to hobbyists on the off chance that one of them might become a whale because the chance of a hobbyist building the next Apple in his garage is close to zero, and if by some miracle he does reach Apple scale, he'll still inevitably end up needing to call Broadcom later as the company expands and diversifies.

Try calling Broadcom or NXP asking for a detailed datasheet for a product that's not aimed at hobbyists, see where that gets you.

[p_l]

They won't.

No one is going to invest into VMware stack, and if they become "whales" they will become that while running a different stack, and why should they invest into replacing it wholesale with customer-hostile Broadcom?

[alephnerd]

OP is right.

Larger companies can bundle more products so you get 4-5 things for the price of 1, plus you get dedicated support staff and account management.

Doesn't matter if you started off as a scrappy startup doing janky platform work - you inevitably migrate to the bundle because pricing is better for enterprises, and account management is much more streamlined.

[hyperman1]

They will, because someone on the board will know someone from vmwares board.

Besides, I've seen people buy oracle because all the big boys need Oracle, and we're a big boy now. Does anyone know what this 'database' thingy is? We really need one in this company, maybe it can store a list of all of our postgreses, mongodbs and mysqls? For management purposes?

[alephnerd]

> I've seen people buy oracle because all the big boys need Oracle

DevEx does matter. Just because your large doesn't mean you can rest on your laurels.

30 years ago IBM DB2 was the goto DBMS, before they got upstarted by Oracle DB2, and the Oracle DB2 customers began moving away to cloud hosted DBs such as AWS DynamoDB or Open Core offerings.

[blindriver]

That’s not what happened with Google office vs Microsoft office. Microsoft is able to work office into whatever large company they want for the most part.

With VMware all the sales team needs to do is point to all their largest customers and say “we support these guys, are you sure your tiny company will meet your needs now that you’re a whale? We even have this convenient migration tool”. And the CIO won’t say no.

[p_l]

Microsoft never cut off the long tail.

I'd argue they explicitly do the opposite. And that's why they could take back clients who went with alternatives - because they have a strategy where they can offer something from small office to multinational corporation, and have tailored packages and strategies at all levels.

And the problem with VMware is that to reach the scale where they are going to play ball, you're probably going to have the parts integrated already. Not a transition from small scale stuff where VMware integrated platform used to turn heads as migration path. Hell, at the scale Broadcom wants to only play there's no migration tooling available - and most is being built now to migrate away.

When you reach the scale Broadcom wants to focus on, you're going to have significant infrastructure spend already - and the CIO might get asked heavy questions regarding migration cost and time.

Frankly speaking, Broadcom strategy is one that does not admit new clients.