Goodbye VMware it’s been productive!
First came the rumors. Then the sale of VMware to Broadcom. With it came a giant stick to the ecosystem’s wheel. VMware Essentials was promptly removed from the online store. The perpetual licenses sales were suspended. The manufacturers began sending it notices that vSphere was no longer a SKU for new servers. WTF, right?
In early february VMware (by Broadcom) announced the end of the free hypervisor. OMG.
A YouTube video is being released on my thoughts on this. In a nutshell, VMware wide adoption was not simply the 3 pillars (that come to mind), Ease, Stability, Scalability. It was the fact that budding IT newbies could download it for free, set up home labs. Perhaps get certified to increase their potential salaries. Much like the Apple ecosystem, VMware drove innovation partially based on the wide adoption of the technologies in various industries and various scales. Backup services, for example, built 3rd party solutions on the understanding the base was strong and expanding. Now that this is contracting, I would hazard to predict that such 3rd parties will think long and hard about the long term benefits of coding for a product that is doomed to be used only by the largest of customers.
So long VMware, and that’s for all the VMs.
Bob Pellerin, Best selling author of “AI Business Strategies”