Broadcom's stated strategy is very simple: focus on 600 customers who will struggle to change suppliers, reap vastly lower sales and marketing costs by focusing on that small pool, and trim R&D by not thinking about the needs of other customers – who can be let go if necessary without much harm to the bottom line.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/30/broadcom_strategy_vmware_customer_impact/
Broadcom made it very clear on the company meeting call that they will focus on the top 20% of customers that bring in 80% of the business. They even called out some examples of products that fit this model, naming the product and the number of customers, which in there example was 20 customers. They can then fire the hundreds of people who are supporting these customers with sales, onboarding, marketing, operations and so on. It totally makes sense. VMware has horrible numbers by every metric, revenue per employee, operating margins and all of that. Broadcom will fix it.
If you listen to the recording they talk about how they want to use VMwares reach for customers as we have a lot more then they do. So doubtful it will be just the top 600. However we have always focused on the largest customers for features anyways.
It’s a very semiconductor mindset. Clearly no experience running a software company. Any company only selling to large enterprise, even G2k is at best stagnant or dying.
I think this is overblown as a concern
Every company gives their top customers some extra love. I am not even sure why Broadcom executives open the door to criticism and talk about this.
You think VMware was giving the same attention to an account that spends $10 million a year as apposed to a company running a few ESX boxes for $10k?
Every company has a list of customers and what they spend and of course the top spenders get more attention. More meetings, more say in product road maps, features, functionality, account manager activity etc ...
Again I am not sure why Broadcom even feels the need to broadcast this to the world.
The majority of the problematic customers are the ones who spend the least and expect support to train their engineers through support issues on "how to".
The very large customers who spend the most open issues after they have throughly investigated it as a software bug.
Am I the only one who thinks that focusing on such a small number of customers is a recipe for disaster?