They failed to transition from technology leader to commodity product.

Well, Broadcom clearly saw that VMware was on the trajectory to be supplanted by either cloud aligned virtualization solutions or built in operating system virtualization. They failed to really carve out another niche because even in the most dedicated VMware shop, all the advances happened in operating systems by other vendors.

So Broadcom decided explicitly to gouge the hell out of customers too afraid to migrate losing any chance at new customers (which they probably weren't going to get any way) and scaring away current customers (I recall some report they felt they could alienate 90% of their customers and still be happy with how hard they were gouging the remaining 10%).

In short, going exactly according to plan.