Virtualization, as a commercial product pointed at businesses, is a legacy product.
Of course large providers are utilizing virtualization, containerization and an abundance of similar technologies. However, they’re not generally using VMware to do it.
I spoke in the context of OPs question.
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.
The sad truth is that Firefox is on life support. Whether we like it or not it is not a player in this game.
Slackware 1.2. It was easier to install than Debian at the time.