As an old ex-vmware eng it's kinda sad reading all these articles about broadcom's controlled descent into terrain. A lot of really cool and useful engineering was done in vmware's heyday, and it was often delivered in rather shaky commercial shapes, but for a while the whole thing kinda worked. And broadcom seems to see it as a company that is long past its ability to innovate, extracting as many dollars as possible before its rapidly decreasing value goes to zero.
There was a solid few years that a lot of business types at vmware behaved as though winning was the default, assured state. It took several years for them to see that that was very much not the case. A real lesson in there, for every successful business today.
Another ex-VMware here (9 years on the Workstation team). It's so very sad to see... I grew up there from a career standpoint and I was proud to be there, loved being there, and I just don't recognize it anymore.
I agree with your point about "winning was the default state." I joined during the Diane Greene era and left in the Pat Gelsinger era, spoke to all three CEOs at different points in one-on-ones, and learned a lot about how different people approach the challenges of running a company and listening to employees.
Pre-Broadcom, sort of toward the end of my time there, there was a lot of unintended self-sabotage that didn't need to happen. We lost people that we shouldn't and shot ourselves in the foot for some really dumb reasons, which just a bit more coordination could have prevented. There were some innovative ideas that got lost in all this, and I believe could have fueled VMware's product line and put it in the right positions for where the sector ultimately went. Alas.
It made a lot of money with its core virtualization tech, which gave it excellent market momentum in datacenters. But the ever growing cloud lanscape was a shift that eventually became an all-hands-on-deck (sort of, and all too late) moment, hence the sudden interest in cloud-based offerings.
IMHO, I think it was never going to be an easy shift. But after Pat left for Intel, leadership never seemed to recover.
No single root cause, but I'd say a combination of rapid growth, a changing market with no obvious (at-the-time) answers, some resource issues, and some missteps by some people.
The company began to grow fast in the years after I joined. VMware's early culture was amazing (a template for any company, imho), but it's hard to maintain that with fast growth. Not a unique situation, but I feel it had an impact on how we addressed certain challenges.
ESX was big, and we wanted to figure out the next big thing. There were a few initiatives, some gambles. Reorgs didn't always match and some initiatives got starved, others over-fed.
Let me take the opportunity to say that we did have a lot of freedom in engineering to build and experiment, which I always loved. This was a strength of the company. Personally, I got to figure out and build Unity in our Workstation product (it let you pop windws out of a VM into the host -- SUPER challenging), the whole remote VM infrastructure for Workstation (took 3 years with a major rewrite), WSX (early-days HTML5 client for accessing VMs using just a native browser and a network connection), amongst others.
But the world changed and we didn't really nail this. Case in point, The Cloud. (And later Docker.)
In early Cloud days, we were trying to figure out what that all this really should look like, how we fit in. We had things in the works that didn't get released or got restarted, we had some really useful bits that got spun out. What we should have built was more obvious in retrospect, but not so much at the time.
I think we had a lot of really good people in the management chain, and overall people were trying to do the right things there. But we did have a few high-impact bone-headed decisions (some short-term cost savings at the expense of longer-term strategy in parts of some departments) and some people who shouldn't have had the responsibilities they did (in my opinion). Some of these decisions may have made sense at those levels at the time due to factors they were dealing with that I don't know about, but these did damage.
Bear in mind, it was a big company in a quickly-evolving industry, and it's not always easy to get things right. I would NOT say "corporate greed" or "screwing over customers" or anything like that. Not while I was there. But missteps and hard questions to answer about the future.
All that said, I enjoyed working there. I left to work on Review Board (https://www.reviewboard.org) full time in 2013, and then my old team disbanded in 2016, but much of the team still gets dinner every month, 10 years later. Still sees movies, still hangs out in a Discord. I wouldn't trade working there for anything.
This is what happens when you let business school grads do whatever they want to make money; particularly, gutting the company over the long run without having to make considerations for the people who did the actual value creation.
If you had to award bonds and/or equity and severance to the people you laid off in order to lay them off, you might have to look beyond the quarterly bump you got for treating customers, vendors, and employees like crap.
There was a solid few years that a lot of business types at vmware behaved as though winning was the default, assured state. It took several years for them to see that that was very much not the case. A real lesson in there, for every successful business today.