[mschuster91]

> Also pretty much guarantees flight of your former customer base to close compliments - who then have improved revenue to bring their products closer in alignment to yours.

Classic VM hosting is a dead end anyway. Customers are shifting to the hyperscalers wherever they can, if only to reduce the headcount of their IT departments due to acounting wizardry making it worth it for the stonk markets even if the cloud costs more in the end.

And then, there aren't that many alternatives to VMware, and none of them (bar OpenStack) as comprehensive.

As long as Broadcom manages to squeeze enough out of the large customers who are vendor-locked too hard over the next 3-5 years, it'll be worth the money for them, and chances are the gamble pays off, with a small trail of extremely large customers paying for a decade until they can get their internal chaos sorted out to migrate off.