this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
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Good on them. Can someone non-snarkily explain why this is good for them financially?
Companies release free products to bring people into their ecosystem. If your company is already using Workstation Player, and now they're looking for a Type 1 hypervisor, it makes sense to seriously consider ESXi. The idea especially is that you get smaller companies hooked on your free products early and then as they grow they buy more of your stuff rather than reconfigure their whole setup. You also get IT enthusiasts and home users to adopt, which gets you name recognition and builds familiarity. Then in the workplace those same users look to your brand as one to trust.
For VMware, the problem is that they recently made a huge volley of deeply anti-consumer moves - basically told all their small customers to fuck off, and told their big customers to prepare to get fucked - and it really did not go the way they'd hoped. Turns out when you're competing in a space where KVM, Hyper-V and XCP all exist, it's actually not that difficult for customers to leave. So they did.
This won't directly help their bottom line but it's presumably a sacrifice play to salvage their brand somewhat. Turns out when you tell people to fuck off, they tend to do just that.
This is probably the play they're making; the only thing that makes me think it might be something else is that they also announced ditching proprietary code in favor of kvm in workstation. Makes me wonder if they instead are deciding to slowly kill the product line, and instead of just stopping development entirely, they're giving it out as if it's some huge gift to try and "buy" good will before it becomes an inferior product?
Either way, support costs for the product are now $0 (because you can't buy it) and development costs are about to be near-zero if they're forking upstream kvm.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/VMware-Workstation-KVM
I suspect it is too little too late. Most small users of VMWare are likely in the final stages of rolling out the replacement. They have chosen the replacement, scoped out what needs to move and what needs to change in processes to move, and are in the final stages of testing before rolling things out. At this point stopping the rollout is even more risky - companies have already figured out they can't trust Broadcomm and so they won't go back even if they can measure VMWare as better, it isn't enough better.
These products are also used among their enterprise customers. So they cannot simply abandon them. But customers are not paying directly for these products (only for the server software). So they make them free. Maybe they hope to lower maintenance costs.
The higher plan must be to maintain good morale among the existing customers, and maybe slow down or even stop their exodus.
"Here, have this piece of niche software that's ok I guess as a way of me charging you out the ass for the only product you actually care about."
They completely focus on large enterprises now.
Everyone who uses Fusion or Workstation productively is too small for them.
Not at all. Most of those Workstation or Fusion users are likely employed by their enterprise customers, and they need an inexpensive way to try to keep them.
I know it’s anecdotal, but when I worked for an enterprise that used VMWare, most of us also tried to use VMWare in our home labs, even though the company didn’t provide licenses.
Back when VMWare was a desired skill, many of us had VMWare in our home labs even when we didn’t have an employer that used it, to maintain proficiency. This doesn’t seem likely anymore but they probably want it