They want 1 in 5 VMWare customers to jump. If they don't, they'll be forcibly pushed off of the edge. Broadcom's entire growth model is to take an established player that is entrenched in massive corporations, introduce that product to the existing portfolio Broadcom offers that customer, and then jack the price on the lot. If you're not in the Fortune 500, Broadcom doesn't want to talk to you and if they keep your business at all it'll be through digital sales or third party resellers.

I am not a fan of them and didn't like working for them, but their financial results speak for themselves. You can attack the ethics of Tan's leadership certainly, but to call him an idiot ignores the fact that he's doing exactly what his shareholders want. Growing the company at obscene returns.

Unfortunately, an economy is now wholly peopled by shareholders, and the most important shareholders are usually the owners and corporate officers.

Software dev who's worked in both tech and finance. I don't measure things in just shareholder returns.

Nor do I, just saying "idiotic" is the wrong pejorative here. He's doing what he's being paid to do and doing it competently and successfully.

People like to do business with people they like, and the Juniors of today are the future CFO, CEO and CTO's. Also IT people have a very, very long memory, and aiming to become the next Oracle is not an advisable strategy.

Being the optimizer of local minima, is bad business strategy, and smart shareholders should plug for a better optimizer.

Don't disagree. I regard Tan as a (powerful) local optimization where the counter argument to broader optimizations is that they're riskier. The latter are though more fundamental. New businesses, new processes, new products are one thing. Profit-taking is another. To get new industries you need far-ranging optimizations.

And so the line goes up, while the product and everything else goes to shit