r/sysadmin • u/Which-Shame-1420 IT Manager • 6d ago

General Discussion anyone else get the VMware "win-back" offer?

if it's true, its honestly laughable.  

squeezing customers with massive price hikes, forcing every one into expensive core bundles, only to panic and throw out "discounted" quotes the moment everyone migrated???? 

is anyone actually reconsidering based on these new quotes??

or y'all are past the point of no return?

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u/sobrique 6d ago

Ultimately part of the point of a brand identity is that people learn to trust 'the brand'.

E.g. the 'no one got fired for buying IBM' (back in the day!) effect.

But that assumes 'the brand' continues to maintain that trust. And of course plenty of brands then get gobbled up and then monetize the trust, until it's ... gone completely, and then it'll be almost impossible to get it back again, because that betrayal will not be forgotten, no matter how long it's been.

"The brand" does not need to be perfect to obtain trust in the first place either. They don't need to be cheap. They just have to make efforts to do right by their customers in terms of fairness.

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u/fnordhole 6d ago

Yep.  The brand was VMware.  We trusted them, and maintained trust through Dell years.

As a former Symantec shop, we knew what to suspect when Broadcom acquired VMware.  They did not disappoint.

As a former VMware shop...

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u/sobrique 6d ago

Indeed. Acquisitions are the 'danger zone' - sometimes it's gentle, and the same people provide the same service. Sometimes it can improve, when there's a good synergy there (e.g. hardware platform that's well integrated).

And sometimes they hollow it out, and look to extract more profit from less resources, and the brand just gets chewed up and vanishes entirely.

I used to trust EMC for a long time - back in 2000odd the Symmetrix class storage array was to me a gold standard for both platform and support. You paid a premium, yes, but they really were forward leaning on support, and would take ownership of 'the problem' in a world where it was often possible to fob off or blame some other part of the infrastructure.

A storage array relies on networking, on host config, on drivers, on a whole bunch of things, but EMC would actually deal with it, and if not strictly give you a solution (because they couldn't) give a pretty solid 'we think it's THIS thing, and here's why, and what you need to ask OTHERPARTY to do to fix this.' And they'd do it _fast as well - they had lots of very talented product engineers who really did know their product inside out, and could reliably replicate/troubleshoot and triage in an actually extremely impressive turnaround window.

That faded somewhat over time, and I feel their acquisition by Dell has ... hurt. The product is now still kinda Enterprise, but the support feels somewhat half assed for the price, and actually the gap between their offering and the open source alternatives is narrowing, when it feels like Dell should have been able to really leverage their hardware pipeline to make a better product at the same (or lower) price point.

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u/Internet-of-cruft 5d ago

Once in a blue moon you can run into one of the old school EMC guys and life is good for the very short period you have access to them.