[tvink]

In terms of competition it's really the same. Whether you fight with a team of 1 for 5 businesses or a team of 10 for 1 business that is 50x bigger, on average as long as you have equal competition in each segment you walk away with the same. But you get very different customers, for better or worse.

A segment of a customer base is hardly a buffer, if you underserve them they will leave, and you will have wasted effort making an inclusive sales and support process to them.

[acdha]

That makes not losing those customers more critical: if you lose one of the 50 smaller businesses, your revenue is barely affected; if you lose that 50x whale, you’re out of a job especially given how hard it is to find another one of that size.

This shows up especially in the context of hiring: for a generation, there have been a ton of people who learn VMware at businesses of all sizes and your large shop can reliably hire them. Shutting down smaller sales affects that directly and because the smaller places are going to do something else it means that the people who move up to a bigger place are going to have direct firsthand experience contradicting what the VMware sales people are saying about how risky it is not to use their software.