The VMWare market cap in 2016 was ~$32B, of course there's no objective way to answer your question definitely as yes or no but I'd say that VMWare was already at that point more than comfortably a more or less de-facto standard for virtualization.
Yeah but there was a big shift away from virtualization to cloud and micro services. As a former VMware admin I'm surprised VMware is doing as well as they are now. But maybe my view is just shaded by the bank I was working for that was moving away from it to AWS.
Yep. This has been the sentiment shared by Google Cloud execs a lot too. All the players are looking at the 10-20 year picture with regard market share / spend (in an industry where no-one knows what compute infrastructure will look like by the middle of that period).
