Increasing price five-fold and losing three out of four customers still means you come out ahead revenue-wise, and your internal costs probably go down as you have so many fewer customers to support
For the current Broadcom leadership this doesn't have to be sustainable, just bring in enough of a profit to justify the whole thing. They do not want a slow and steady profit stream but a big squeeze and done. I bet they got what they hoped for.
Some percentage of customers can’t leave if they want to. The ones who have laid off and cost cut to such a level they can no longer undertake projects to move to another virtualization environment. I’m at one such company. The staff we have now couldn’t do it in a year, or even two.
It’s like oil drilling, completely unsustainable but great money to be made short-term. It just needs to be milkable long enough to make more money than the acquisition price
what happens to a software product when it has a small fraction of the original users? all that free testing as customer support shifts to someone else's platform, eventually
but i think the 'eventually' is the reason this is working for them
