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It turns out that you don’t have to love your customers to make money. Abuse is the end state of most products once they’ve reached a point where there are few if any customers left to enthrall but still the world demands ever greater profit. VMware was and is there. Intel too actually.

As someone who was at Oracle pre & post Sun acquisition, in sales of all roles (with a decade tenure there) … and then later at VMWare - Bryan lives in his own Reality Distortion and it’s quite unfortunate.

Engineering wise, brilliant.

But very much out of touch with reality.

I admire Bryan and Oxide but outing your former coworker’s private conversation with you because they said something you didn’t like on email is, to use Bryan’s terminology, “gross.”

How many former Sun folks are in senior engineering management at Broadcom? Might as well have just posted the person’s name.

>suing your customers is gross

It's not gross, lawsuits are how you keep both parties honest. If you never sue your customers you are letting them walk over you and exploit you.

Love you Bryan, but:

> Companies that have disdain for their own customers will be reviled in return. Such companies may be able to thrive in the short term, but they do not endure in the limit.

Oracle has endured nearly 50 years. Sun did not endure.

I don't want to live in a world where one of the most successful and widespread corporate strategies is also disturbingly un-humanistic, but we're never going to find a better way unless our mental models for how customer relationships map to business success actually align with reality.

Thank you Bryan for writing this. I’m not American, but the behaviour Bryan is calling out is in my opinion why American capitalism is in decline.

When an entity parts with their money for your product or services it is a recognition of the value you provide to them. There is symbiosis here. When you lose track of this, you end up with cronyism.

Ultimately, for the individual, it’s a matter of how you want to die. You either aim to have a fat bank account, or you aim to have a fantastic adventure making things you want to see in the world happen.

I think it’s pretty clear what Mr. Cantrill has chosen.

I work in infrastructure at one of the players in the lawsuits, I won't mention which one. Make no mistake, we are moving out of broadcom. We're not crawling back. There is enough technical skills to maneuver large infrastructure projects and cloud engineering. Our exit strategy began over a year and half ago. In hindsight it should have begun 8 years earlier after similar pricing issues with Wiley Introscope (which broadcom also acquired). But better late than never.

It’s uncommon to love your customer. Customers are demanding. Have you ever spoken with the locals in a resort town? Their economy depends on the tourists… who they generally loathe.

Nice

A little hungover, but some foggy thoughts: If a company can differentiate itself by loving its customers, then that is an indictment of the rest of the entire industry. Loving one's customers should be the standard. But alas, the people with their hands on the money-faucet tend reward profitable (zero-sum) behavior over virtuous (positive-sum) behavior. One can only hope that after they alienate enough of the population, they will run into problems that they cannot buy their way out of (so that they can learn what it feels like when those-who-cannot are at the mercy of those-who-can).

I like the sentiment, I really do, but enshittification is a civilization-wide problem. It’s not solved by asking corporations to be nicer.

Odd framing for the opposite of “holding customers hostage” - I don’t think people want or need to be loved by their enterprise software.