So I may be biased but what is vmwares USP? From my limited experience it was a slightly more polished GUI for creating VMs and the ability to run on older pre-virt hardware. Is the experience still objectively better than the alternatives?

If you’re running a lab or a small shop any hypervisor can likely do the job. Anything above that VMware’s overall ecosystem is the most robust and well-supported.

At this point virtualization is a legacy technology. It’s not going to disappear tomorrow but its clock is ticking the same way the clock was ticking for mainframes thirty years ago. Plenty of mainframes still out there but nobody is implementing new. Same can be said for virtualization. It’s a limited market with significantly slowed growth over where it was a decade ago.

The move to a subscription model will let them squeeze every last dollar out of the technology while they still can.

Wait what

virtualization is a legacy technology

AWS, GCP, and Azure run on virtualization. Do you think all these cloud providers are providing everyone bare metal? This doesn’t include containerization which is a subset of virtualization. Your average shop might not run virtualization directly unless of course your team touches VirtualBox or Vagrant or qemu or (probably shouldn’t) HyperV.

Either your understanding of virtualization is very lacking or you didn’t explain your point very well. I am really curious what you meant.