Broadcom’s brutal assault on VMware’s product suite continues, with the company’s new owner this week confirming that it is sunsetting a massive 56 VMware products and platforms – as investors said this week that they anticipated a “tectonic shift” in the infrastructure market as a result.
In a January 15 advisory VMware confirmed tersely that it was taking a sweeping range of products to “End of Availability” and that “these products are no longer available for purchase” – although most remain advertised enthusiastically, for now, on slick corporate website pages.
↫ Ed Targett
The list of products is a thing to behold, for sure. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many enterprise products together in one list, and I once spent weeks scouring and dealing with HPE.
Ha, ha.
Serves right for me for assuming they would at least keep the existing services on subscription. They seem to be even disabling purchased but not activated keys, so it is worse than my worst imagination.
Wait. What? They are disabling product that you paid for before it is even delivered to you? Are they refunding?
At the very least, you would think they would set a deadline for activation. Even then, they should not cancel. They should activate and then they can age out of support like everything else.
What you are saying sounds brutal. I would not want to deal with that company even for the product they are not discontinuing.
This was from the reddit discussion on new partner agreement changes:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vmware/comments/194zwng/vmware_oem_partners_and_resellers_received_a/
Not sure whether these are the keys sold to end users, or to partners. But in any case very alarming.
(Also I would still keep this as rumor since there was only one source reporting it)
Feels like the end of an era. But also, completely daft.
OK VMware want to move away, then either package the company up and sell it. Or just have it generate some revenue on the quiet.
Like when IBM sold lotus notes, they knew they didn’t want to maintain it, so sold it off and someone can generate their million or two a year, that for IBM is nothing but for someone else is a nice little gold mine while it lasts.
Does Broadcom have competing products for those?
This has happened to various degrees with online music, movies, games, ebooks, now software activation codes. When you buy something yet someone else holds the keys to it, via DRM or remote activation, you don’t really own anything. The publishers who hold the keys can regneg and customers who bought their copies in good faith get screwed.
Richard Staman called this stuff defective by design.
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/about_defectivebydesign
Old users with perpetual licenses can be affected to if they have to reinstall or migrate to new hardware and cannot reactivate.
Using software from broadcom or a company owned by Broadcom is a recipe for suffering. Best move to hyperV or KVM like we are doing.