Well, actually hardware consolidation is a use case, sure, but I think nowadays it's more about redundancy, fault tolerance, rapid deployment/decomissioning. If you are doing it right, your "OS" boot volumes should be considered disposable, but a lot of shops do it wrong and want the OS volumes to be hosted in centralized storage, which is much easier with a virtual machine approach (yes you can SAN/iSCSI boot, but it's not very appealing).

Of course your first point stands, that VMWare has competition with adequate capability and until now vmware could largely get by because the customers are too lazy to move and the price wasn't enough to make them look hard at options. It's not like mainframe style lock in where the porting effort is supremely daunting, though what you say about they don't need it to last too long for it to have been worth it also stands.

Of course, the nice meaty IBM locked in ecosystem is far stickier than VMWare.

That replacement for a mainframe, can it run exactly the same software? Generally not, it has to be ported, and porting is risk.

For VMWare, the replacements can run the same exact applications (the processor architecture and software stack have nothing to do with vmware's part of the solution). A customer may be *somewhat* stickier as they bought into vmware-centric solutions with partners, but as they migrate to newer hardware platforms, they can comfortably look at alternatives without terror that their applications are doomed if they try.

There's some friction against migration of course, but no where near what mainframe enjoys.

Reading into the article and his choice of words, sure some get some negotiated break, but the key is his use of the phrase:
complaints "don't play out"

What he means is that the customers complain, but the complaints are invalid because the customer isn't using as much of the feature set as they *could*, and so the complaint has no merit because they are getting what they paid for even if it's useless to them.

He then goes to either fabricate or cherry pick a few examples of what a customer might say when they recognize what fools they have been and how much more they could get out of their vmware purchase.

Well clearly you just need to start using 31.1k/year of the additional value you will be getting /s

Ubuntu LTS has "Pro" offerings that take it out that far, and Windows isn't free, so it seems fair to include their paid expanded support.

The reason I wouldn't use the RHEL/Alma/Rocky is that I am impatient for new features, but if I was a "I don't care I want to run this for 10 years", then I'd run it on my desktop. I think this is mostly the reason enthusiasts dislike them, which is an opposed concern to "not supported long enough". RHEL10 recently released based on Fedora 40, where desktop enthusiasts are running a Fedora edition a whole year newer.

For Fedora, the "click here to upgrade" is pretty similar to the Windows "click here to upgrade" experience. Unless you get adventurous in ways you couldn't have gotten adventurous in Windows.

As a Fedora user, sometimes you have a period of software instability when they push something not yet baked. It may be for a reason, but that reason may be nearly impossible to discern.

It's not news because the community is broadly used to it and they generally accept it as the cost of getting stuff faster.

Fedora is not as bad as it used to be, but they are really aggressive and inflict oddities from time to time.

If I were really bothered, I could go run something extra conservative, like Debian Stable or Alma Linux, but I prefer the fast-ish delivery of Fedora even accepting that sometimes things can go a bit south.

What LTS editions only do 5 years? I just checked SUSE, Ubuntu, and RHEL.

RedHat is up to 13 years, with the the first 5 years being "full" including releasing for brand new hardware and backporting as needed with another 5 years of "you can keep running it on the hardware you have, but we aren't promising support for new hardware" and another available 3 years of paid extension. Note that Windows 10 pretty much went "maintenance" with the release of Windows 11, so the RHEL lifecycle largely imitates the Windows lifecycle.

SUSE is a bit more generous on paper, but roughly this is about all the LTSes.

However day to day users are not interested and go for the options that favor rapid delivery of new capability, so people don't talk about them as much.

Exactly. Even if a technology might have a shot at being desirable, I often see seller interests trample the value and then the seller surprised that the customers didn't go for it after they did absolutely nothing to cater to the user base.

One company I worked at had this persistent issue and a strong warning sign was that they just absolutely worshipped the fictional Henry Ford quote about customers just wanting faster horses and the inventor knowing better than the customer about what the customer should want.

Even adjusting for "all movement is somewhat useful for the skill of driving", an AI model driving consumes training material way more than a human will ever see in their lifetime if they popped right out of a womb and drove for every waking and sleeping moment of their life, several times over. The amount of input and feedback about spacial navigation from just moving about is still a tiny amount by both amount of movement and hours of movement of the training data.

Same for text processing, not only does it consume more than a human will ever see, it will consume more text than a human will ever see, hear, conceptualize across many lifetimes.

Yes, the AI scenarios have a more narrow scope of material but the volume of it is still inordinately more than a human will consume no matter how much you credit somewhat different experiences as "equivalent".

The general point being made is that it does *not* do what they expect it to do, but it looks awfully close to doing that and sometimes does it right until it obnoxiously annoys people.

Most laypeople I've interacted with whose experience has been forced AI search overviews are annoyed by them because they got bit by incorrect results.

The problem is not that the technology is worthless, it's that the "potential" has been set upon by opportunistic grifters that have greatly distorted the capabilities and have started forcing it in various ways. It's hard to tell the signal from the noise when you have so many flim flam artists dominating the narrative.

Now the thing is, as a culture we greatly reward the humans that speak with baseless confidence and authority. They are politicians and executives. Put a competent candidate against a con-man and 9 times out of 10 the con-man wins. Most of the time only con-men are even realistically in the running.

It's at least beyond the current breed of "AI" technologies, even as those techniques get scaled to absurd levels they still struggle in various ways.

A nice concrete example, attempts at self driving require more time and distance of training data than a human could possibly experience across an entire lifetime. Then it can kind of compete with a human with about 12 hours of experience behind the wheel that's driven a few hundred miles. Similar story for text generation, after ingesting more material than a human could ever possibly ingest they can provide some interesting, yet limited results.

It's absolutely critical, further you have to do it in dvorak if you want any credibility.

This is a strong case for fixing the mechanisms that demand "full time" work, particularly benefits. Need to split especially health insurance off from employment status, one way or another. We need the flexibility to reduce working hours or years without being hit by the limitations of "part time work".

Also a good way to let some folks better assemble a 'full time' work life from multiple 'part time' jobs.

While more drastic measures may be premature, I do think it has always made sense to do something to break that "employer == path to health insurance" BS (as well as other benefits).

The issue then is that if UBI is insufficient to live on, then it can't really replace welfare for those who can't get a job at all.

Also, in this hypothetical, where there are negligible "job opportunities", it's not like folks even have an option to augment with earned income.

I agree with the concern about "just cut checks" gives a lot of risk of the rich to change the practical value of the numbers being doled out compared to measures to assure actual access to the relevant goods and services directly.