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VMware has fundamentally changed its virtualization software offerings, announcing that its Fusion and Workstation products-its applications for creating and managing virtual machines are now free to everyone. These were previously only available to be used personally, but not for charge. The company has now opened the offer to all users, with businesses.
To make the software free, VMware has also canceled sales for the Pro versions of Fusion (for Macs) and Workstation (for Windows and Linux), meaning that no method will exist for users to purchase such editions anymore.
That shift comes after Broadcom acquired VMware for $61 billion in 2022, which has experienced pretty dramatic overhauls in terms of how the company thinks about product strategy. Over the last year, VMware drastically cut its portfolio, eliminated many licenses and SKUs of its software. For instance, VMware announced it was no longer offering perpetual licensing of the company’s individual standalone products to its enterprise customers, which are locked into migrating to Cloud Foundation or vSphere Foundation.
However, with this change has come alarm for some of its business customers. according to Business Insider reported that some corporate clients have seen their prices skyrocket after the deal. An unnamed client claimed that its prices jumped to 175%, terms they considered to be “held for ransom.” The challenge in finding an alternative to the VMware product was, according to them, among the main reasons why some of these clients had to be “forced” to stick around with VMware’s surging price.
While the commercial agreements between VMware and most businesses will continue to remain in place, VMware has confirmed that it will not provide support tickets upon the expiration of such contracts for troubleshooting issues. Instead, they will make businesses go to community forums, documentations, and other self-help means of getting help.
This plan seems to harden the long-term thrust from VMware to maximize the revenue related to its subscription-based offerings where it reaps maximum revenue from high-value enterprise clients although providing virtualization free software for attracting new customers.
