Exactly.

Many SMB’s lack the in-house expertise to switch to something like Proxmox, and even then the support contract cost for things like Proxmox or TRUENAS, etc, isn’t much less than what VMware intends to charge.

Management in such businesses have a hard time comprehending the value in paying for a transition when the annual support costs at the moment don’t seem significantly lower (depending on number of processors, of course). There’s still the migration cost, and the risk of migrating.

SMB tends to outsource their system management a great deal - I can only hope these vendors see the value in migrating away from VMware.