Opinion It looked like the most cynical corporate move in recent years, at least in IT. A year and a half after it was announced, it has proven to be. Broadcom's $61 billion purchase of VMware was expected to follow a familiar formula—price hikes, product abandonment, complete ecosystem destruction—and the creation of two classes of people.

First class? Rich people who got much richer. The other? Anyone who doesn't align with the vision of "big companies only", who can now leave the New Protectorate of VMware by Broadcom, thank you. Like now. Citizenship revoked. Bye.

If you've never been in or depended on a company violently acquired and stripped by sharks, you may not recognize the screams of betrayal and rage from those whose careers and clients just became so much capitalist pals. These feelings are fully justified. Remember them: Broadcom's masterstroke may not work out as hoped, with those it has abandoned as the cause.

With virtualization, it's not the product that matters as much as the underlying technology, and Broadcom can't buy that. Hardware virtualization is one of the latest core CPU technologies to become mainstream with Intel's Pentium 4 in 2005 and Arm with the Cortex-A7 in 2011. VMware itself launched in 1999. You don't need explicit hardware support to do virtualization, in the same way that you don't need a dentist to pull a tooth. It's just much faster, less painful and more reliable.