Private equity... or Broadcom... bleed dying things dry. It's arbitrage on companies that are too slow to adopt new technology. Instead of watching something die slowly squeeze it for everything it's got by making the inflexible companies pay for their inability to change.
The end of a dead product is the same, but the financial reaper is betting they can make more money killing something quickly.
Should be a rule that when this happens and these companies fold that everything is open sourced - at least we'd all get something out of it.
Was VMWare dying prior to the acquisition? I don't really know the financials but that wasn't the impression I had.