I’m not so sure the VMWare/Broadcom story is as much ignorance as many are, but rather intentional. They see the big bucks are in the large cloud providers, and knowing it’s not easy to switch away from your current virtualization, they can bend them over a barrel for a year or two and see massive profit gains. Those providers may consider transitioning to other products, but VMware will lock them in with new contracts first.

And for the resellers and SMB customers, it’s pennies compared to the cloud providers.

Fine, I can see the SMB space embracing things like Proxmox/KVM. It runs on x86 hardware, so if we see companies like Dell providing on server hardware, it’s game over in the SMB space for VMware. Imagine having to choose to renew a VMware license for 30% more, or just build new hosts running Proxmox, and transition. Especially since all hardware has a limited lifespan, often 3-5 years in SMB. So a server replacement is just around the corner… Good time to transition.

SMB has hit the point of being the “next market”. There’s a smaller set of enterprise environments, many more SMB’s, and there’s more volatility in the SMB space. So being able to support them, and manage mergers, etc, without worrying about licensing, is a huge benefit. Licensing in SMB is a hellscape, especially when dealing with mergers/transitions.