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contrarian1234
trynumber9
Broadcom/Avago is more of a corporate raiding company than anything else at this point. They took the name of one of their victims to hide it a bit.
startupsfail
This feels like a fuckup. The acquisition should have been blocked for the same reason Nov 2017 takeover of Qualcomm was blocked.
anonuser123456
Most long term Broadcom people I know are pretty happy with Hock Tan’s leadership.
camel_gopher
So like Hannibal Lechter
smokefoot
It’s not that different from software focused private equity shops like Thoma Bravo. Buy a software company, starve it of resources, and price just below each clients BATNA. Revenue may decline over time, but costs fall faster and the buyer harvests that premium. There’s no synergies, just a willingness to be more ruthless and give fewer shits.
Edit: clarity
sidewndr46
you forgot the classic move of "release the legal team to sue anyone doing anything vaguely similar to your patents"
smokefoot
Yes! And aggressively enforce your software license agreements with frequent audits.
Anything to make money other than innovating and actually building better products.
alephnerd
50% of Broadcom's revenue comes from Enterprise SaaS. They already have an APM play (CA Technologies), EPP play (Symantec Enterprise), and Data Security play (Symantec Enterprise). By acquiring VMWare, they can add a Private Cloud and Network Security play.
All these plays converge into allowing a company to buy their entire Enterprise Infra stack from Broadcom.
upupupandaway
Anybody in charge of making purchase decisions for Enterprise SaaS and going for a full-Broadcom stack should be fired.
danmur
Instead of being promoted and moving on, claiming it as a victory evermore
slt2021
CA Tec, Symantec and now vmware - sounds like a combo of failed software companies which are no longer competitive and exclusively cater to boomer enterprise companies and close b2b deals with heavy bribes and quid pro quos
alephnerd
The whole point of a business is to make money. That's it. By catering to "boomer enterprise companies" also known as FORTUNE 1000 you can make billions a quarter.
Jesus HNers are dense.
natbennett
They’ve run out of chip companies to buy, so they have to figure out how to buy software companies. This is a little bit speculative but I believe they’re substantially interested in VMware’s capability to buy and integrate other software companies.
Spooky23
None. It’s a slumlord scenario. Buy it and milk as much cash as possible. VMWare has a decade to coast into oblivion.
mrweasel
It doesn't really seem like Broadcom has an overall plan. We used a load balancer, briefly owned by Broadcom, but for some reason they didn't want it and sold it to PulseSecure. Had they kept it they could have build something where they would provide an easy load balancer integration for VMware, but I don't believe that how Broadcom thinks.
Better Broadcom network drivers for VMware?
There's a lot of potential synergies, like tailoring network card to VMware, adapting their APM to enable for VMs easily. Storage solution optimized for VMware. I just don't believe that they think in those lines, or maybe they do when they want to justify their purchases, but then never follow up.
Overall I think it's weird that VMware has such a hard time existing as an independent company. They are pretty dominant in their field which very little competition. Most companies I've dealt with run VMware for at least part of their business. I see this as being just as much a failure of VMware management to run a successful near-monopoly.
alephnerd
> maybe they do when they want to justify their purchases
It's this. They are very strategic about where they invest money. If they can get around a 20x RoI they will build it. If they can't they'll shut downt the division.
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systemBuilder
This is all Avago. They bought Broadcom, eviscerated America's #2 communications chip company, and renamed Avago Broadcom to hide their crimes against humanity ...
anonuser123456
They liberated us. Before Avago they were throwing good money after bad.
chx
On the eve of the US' favorite war criminal finally dying could we please not inflate our words. Corporate raiding is not nice but crimes against humanity?
rokkitmensch
Eviscerating one of the last bastions of chipmaking know-how en nosotros estados unidos is not really something one can under-sell.
egberts1
kKR and Silver Lake (both private equity firms) created Avago.
Avago rolled up several companies including Broadcom and are 86% institution owned (Vanguard and Blackrock top 2)
Most of the layoff are marketing and sales as well as some engineering (it is a cut monthly cost and reap the revenue flow acquisition).
A slim chance of Avago/Broadcom utilizing its full enterprise SaaS hardware/software stack as I suspect it was just for "prospective show" in getting the acquisitee companies to be suckered in into the acquisition deal.
toomuchtodo
Related:
Broadcom lays off many VMware employees after closing acquisition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38436419 - Nov 27th, 2023 (208 comments)
natbennett
I continue to find it vexing that these articles don’t include whether this is news to the employees involved. The transitional offers were, I have heard, pretty good.
x3n0ph3n3
This is not news to employees. Most U.S. employees knew if they were continuing with Broadcom before the deal even closed.
xyst
Bloodcom is ruthless. Wonder what the severance package is like
anemoiac
Oh gee this makes me feel good as a VMWare user... :}
What I mean is... Motherfucker...
risho
as a person who really likes workstation i imagine that i'm pretty screwed now.
mintplant
Yep, I do my development almost entirely within a Linux VM on a Windows laptop. Workstation already feels kinda neglected (lack of support for distinguishing between P and E cores is one recent unresolved pain point), so all of this is really putting me on edge.
daynthelife
Is there a reason not to just install Linux (and dual boot into windows if you need it for some things)?
I suppose if it’s a work laptop they might not be too pleased with this.
mintplant
Then I would have to reboot all the time to switch back and forth. And hardware acceleration is better on Windows, so I usually have web browsing, music, videos, messaging, etc, running on Windows on one monitor or virtual desktop while my terminal is open in the Linux VM on another. Like another commenter mentioned, power management on Windows is still better, too.
usefulcat
Seems like Linux laptops are generally not known for their great battery life. Would certainly be an issue for many laptop users.
ragesh
If you're on Windows and need a VM, why not use Hyper-V? I haven't touched anything from VMWare in decades, so I'm genuinely curious.
temeritatis
VMWare has the best virtual graphics performance IMHO. Hyper-V or Virtualbox is just painful in comparison. Until graphic vendors support partitioning GPU resources to allow sharing the main GPU to a VM using passthrough, it will likely remain one of the best options for many.
candiddevmike
WSL2 works great for me, you should check it out
InvertedRhodium
Disk performance can be a problem under WSL2, I ended up switching to Workstations after running into this issue: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197
gerdesj
The theory is "we already have a finance, S&M, admin etc" so we will dump the other one wot we just bought. That will instantly fix up the PandL and BS and the share price will simply head north because we have dumped duplicated cost sinks. Loverly
Obviously, we won't bother to compare functions and functionality now 'coz ours will be the better one, 'cos its ours.
Broadcom seem to be a firm of breakers, shakers and dumpers.
natbennett
So is VMware. Not as severely so, but they took apart a bunch of systems in Pivotal because they already had one. Never mind that Pivotal’s version worked and VMware’s didn’t.
Especially amusing (in hindsight) in the case of provisioning test VSphere clusters.
papichulo2023
More like fire expensive developers and hire cheaper somewhere else
leovander
As far back as May they were already figuring out which teams would eat each other up.
01100011
Any news on the locations of the cuts? It looks like VMware is mostly in the Bay Area.
ajmurmann
This article is only about California, but people were laid off everywhere. Source: I'm one of them and am in Oregon.
depereo
1/2 of all Australian employees are getting made redundant, and it looks like 100% of new Zealand employees are out. Several office locations in Oceania are gone.
natbennett
“The jobs are located at VMware’s Palo Alto headquarters, which will remain open.”
x3n0ph3n3
Broadcom is moving their official HQ to the former VMware campus in Palo Alto. It's actually a pretty large and amazing campus.
rkagerer
What does this mean for the future of the product?
pjmlp
I guess Spring is also affected.
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Could someone who understands the situation better explain .. what are the business synergies between Broadcom and VMware? Is there any business overlap at all..?
Maybe buying and laying off is a profitable move, but I'd expect it to be done by investment firms that specialize in that. It'd be a bizarre financial gamble for a chip company. So there must be some angle where this makes sense for them and not for anyone else