Here's the VMware story in a nutshell. Several years back, the company pioneered x86 server virtualization. It was a huge hit. Companies started to realize that virtualization was a scalable way to perform IT workloads at significantly reduced costs. And when they started to employ server virtualization, they overwhelmingly did so with VMware. But, come 2016-17, the server virtualization market had pretty much dried up. That is, enterprise data-center virtualization levels were nearing 100%.