[lokar]

I’m surprised by the comments here.

The Broadcom business model (outside the chip business) had been pretty well known, and they don’t really hide it.

They are tech bottom feeders. They find large businesses with a decent moat and free cash flow but are in long term decline (and wasting cash trying to find something new). They buy them, cut development, support and marginal products. Raise prices and squeeze as much as they can.

[SlightlyLeftPad]

It’s the same modus operandi as private equity but worse, because Broadcom has the money and technical resources to do interesting things with the technology, but they don’t.

[lokar]

KKR bought Avago, which bought Broadcom and took the name.

They are a PE firm

[lenkite]

Someone really needs to build an "Evil Companies" list with flowcharts showing the date/time of demonic possession.

[port11]

I started building one some years ago, until a friend pointed out that I’d be unemployable and probably targeted.

[saagarjha]

I guess one of the people who made their millions and retired should do it

[ethbr1]

Sounds hard to do from a yacht...

[fauchletenerum]

Do it anonymously?

[rbanffy]

Calling @cstross as technology and demonic possession seem to be some of his core competences.

[thisislife2]

Crowdsource it - do it on Wikipedia?

[red-iron-pine]

still easy enough to target, and with the added benefit of non-stop internecine wikipedia arguments + the marketing depts of these firms edit pages + potential lawsuits

[wmf]

I think KKR sold Avago/Broadcom years ago but the same CEO and private equity mindset is still there.

[asdff]

Wikipedia's ownership section on broadcom is stale 2024 data but back then at least 10 investment firms and banks owned about 40% of it.

[ddeck]

Broadcom is publicly listed with a public float of about 98% (i.e. 98% of it's shares are listed publicly).

You're right that most shares are held by institutions (~80%), but that typically reflects the fact that most share ownership by individuals/companies goes through intermediaries (401k, fund investments, ETF etc.). Most of this institutional ownership is just asset managers, insurance, banks etc. taking their cut before passing returns/loses through to the end risk holder. The average institutional ownership of companies in the S&P500 for example is also ~80%.

None of this takes away from the point that Broadcom is absolutely run like a PE firm as the original commenter noted.

Not surprising given the CEO was appointed by KKR/Silverlake 20 years ago.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AVGO/holders/?p=AVGO

[throw0101a]

> None of this takes away from the point that Broadcom is absolutely run like a PE firm as the original commenter noted.

So a public(ly-traded) private equity firm. :)

[next_xibalba]

This is not true.

Broadcom is a public company. It doesn't have a single or even majority owner.

[parasubvert]

They do keep investing in their software "just enough" to keep customers from churning.

These sorts of lawsuits never really make it to court, there's a negotiation tactic.

Meanwhile Broadcom's software revenue led by VMware keeps growing 30% YoY and they close new contracts because in spite of being expensive.... because there's very few true alternatives in the market to VMware Cloud Foundation at high scale - Nutanix, Proxmox, Azure Stack, and OpenShift all exist but have their own problems. I've worked with them all, and they're all... big, expensive and difficult, though VMware probably is the most stable and hassle free of the bunch. Just costs a lot.

[anonymousiam]

Revenue may be increasing, but their customer base is decreasing, and any customer who's paying attention is now looking for an exit strategy.

Yes, the alternatives have their problems, but ESXi/VMware/VCenter/VSphere have a lot of problems too. I will disagree with your claim that "VMware is the most stable and hassle free of the bunch." I spec'ed, installed, and ran a VMware cluster for a few years and it was never very stable. After a while I stopped installing the software updates because they would usually break something.

More than once, after applying an update, I had to re-install the licenses for each server and its associated CPUs, which is a painful process. We initially installed using an external DNS, but the cluster was so flaky that we had to switch to their recommended configuration of local DNS. There was a never ending stream of security vulnerabilities, so you were highly incentivized to patch, but it never got any better.

[parasubvert]

> Revenue may be increasing, but their customer base is decreasing, and any customer who's paying attention is now looking for an exit strategy.

VMware in 2024 had 96% of the virtualization market and 500k customers. The above is somewhat true but also kind of like saying "the USA is in decline"... okay, but it's so big that it's going to take a very long time, and not every arrow is pointing down.

Broadcom focusing on higher margin larger customers hurts the 10+ year horizon but at the same time they're closing massive (9 figure) deals 5 years out including some very large expansions. Everyone is going to look for an exit - as they should! - but that doesn't mean they actually WILL exit.

(I don't work for VMware, though I did years ago, I am an independent).

> I spec'ed, installed, and ran a VMware cluster for a few years and it was never very stable. After a while I stopped installing the software updates because they would usually break something.

I would gently suggest this isn't really much of an anecdote. This is like saying "I ran Linux once and it never seemed stable, so I stopped updating it".

There's VMware customers that range from a dozen VMs on a cluster to literally hundreds of clusters each with 10-20 hosts each with 100+ cores and 2 TB+ RAM and thousands of VMs... adding up to 500k+ VMs at the largest customers.

> More than once, after applying an update, I had to re-install the licenses for each server and its associated CPUs, which is a painful process.

This is not something I have encountered in 20+ years or could find an KB about online to indicate it was a widespread issue (though maybe it was if you have a link). Broadcom moved all licenses to subscription recently, which caused issues here but otherwise this feels odd.

> We initially installed using an external DNS, but the cluster was so flaky that we had to switch to their recommended configuration of local DNS.

I am not sure I understand, What do you mean by local vs external DNS? I am familiar with Kubernetes clusters having local CoreDNS and a plugin for plumbing external records called External DNS, however these aren't vSphere concerns. Vsphere uses standard NTP and DNS and doesn't ship with a DNS server, it doesn't have any recommendations on where or how it runs other than it being highly available.

[nikanj]

Most stable of the bunch does not mean ”100% stable”

[csdreamer7]

What specific issues did you have with OpenShift at high scale? How long ago was it?

Curious since it is the truly real open source one.

[parasubvert]

It's a long story: OpenShift was a bad product all around until 2019 with v4, the 3rd rewrite, but that product was a home run. That in itself was an incredible turnaround, even before they moved away from Openstack and turned Openshift into also a VM platform.

Mostly the other problems are the typical problems of managing bare metal multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster. The customers that don't have as many of these problems are ironically running openshift on vSphere ;).

while the OCP operators and GUIs cover much of the usual day to day , you really need deep Kubernetes expertise at scale, and need to drop down to the upstream project code and docs. For example it is very hard to force configuration discipline on tenants (leading to many flowers blooming here like Kyverno); security in Kubernetes is complex and requires careful tradeoffs on policies; it is laborious and counterintuitive (requests vs limits - ie. you should always set requests and be very careful setting limits) to manage compute capacity and noisy neighbours, Submariner and OVN-Kubernetes network services are limited compared to HCX+NSX (eg. NAT topologies, distributed firewall management, tunnels, fabric connectivity ie. VRFs or EVPN support though this is coming soon... also Openshift's metalLB for ingress load balancing is its own thing with its own connectivity config), out of the box observabiity is not very good and requires 3rd party solutions or extensive customized configurations , and the Kubernetes scheduler itself is focused on efficient bin packing rather than workload stability.

Also replacing vSphere VMs with OSV, you lose DRS which is a big blow... you do keep vmotion live migration equivalence but you must use a NetApp Filer (or any NFS store) for your VMs, or Nutanix Files, or ODF/Ceph in RWX volume mode. ODF/Ceph is more laborious to manage than VSAN (it requires its own knowledge well), but importantly has native S3 object storage, which VSAN still is missing (though I hear it is imminent in VCF 9.1.2). VLAN assignment to VMs with NMstate and multi-NIC failover has gotten better here over the years with OCP though feels shakier (more complexity is exposed, LACP is required, etc) than the VMware distributed switch native load based NIC teaming or NSX.

Overall if you squint, OpenShift can replace much of vSphere on paper , and at least somewhat in practice - but you really, really need a sharp ops team that knows what they're doing and at least some 3rd party solutions for capacity and observability. I'm also not sure redhat education and consulting is scaled at the level required to build these skills in industry quickly enough, though IBM certainly has the qualifications to do so. That said Broadcom is also doing plenty to squeeze or shed its education and consulting to partners which is ... a mixed bag usually at first that doesn't end well, and leads to repatriation.

[lifeisstillgood]

Being told you are carrying a scorpion across a river is not a lot of help halfway across.

I think however this mostly speaks about how hard it is to run anything even vaguely securely. There are so many independant CPUs and OSes on one motherboard plus HDD these days …

[gste]

That's what Constellation Software do and they're in the top 20 biggest software companies. It's not a niche thing for sure