I found this rather odd: > “We used to pay for VMware software one month in arrears,” he said

Either their sales team absolutely screwed this up, or they just don't want to bother with the VMware platform anymore. Maybe both?

Perhaps similar strategy as spammers employ today? Where they try to filter away people quickly who wouldn't fall for it when they need it to. So do something slightly outrageous today, so you filter away the ones that won't stick around for the future more outrageous changes.

Because they have twelve thousands vms and are themselves a provider that can't afford to have downtime for its customers. So the thinking here was probably "there is no way they can refuse to sign right now and destroy their business in the process, so we might as well take the cake and also force them to stay after so they don't leave in 11 months and 29 days". Turns out that thinking is wrong for that specific customers, but for how many did it work ?

In my experience, VMWare attempts to force this model on everyone using tactics like not giving quotes until the very last minute, forcing buyers into a "take it or leave it" decision.. thinking (rightly so) that it will work in their favor most of the time. It takes a lot of balls for a company to "leave it" right as their contract is expiring, and speaks to talent and experience on the customer side to be able to stand up to bullying, and be able to pull off such a large migration.

The lock in is strong with their product and they know it. Migrating hypervisors is a long and arduous process for any medium-to-small business, and I speak from experience: it took our small team about 2 months to move off of VMware about a decade ago, also because the price of support was simply unhinged from our perspective. They would be fools to not expect high attrition of smaller clients, but big businesses and government customers aren't going to change, or at least not nearly to the tune that smaller ones would, and a smaller pool of larger customers paying a higher price probably works pretty well to keep revenues up while letting them slash support staff without too much of a reduction in quality for those that are left. It was clear to me from the beginning that this price hike wasn't about cash flow, not particularly. Broadcom doesn't want vmware wasting money supporting sma…

I had my license cost from another large company YoY increase 10x (hefty amount). Reason was new sales manager who wanted to shake max money. They make revenue and then move on.