Part of the problem here is that the people who make the purchasing decisions (like this CTO guy) don't care about "the experience" because they're not the ones unpacking boxes and plugging in cables.
They pay other people to do that and they don't really care if it's a miserable time. And if it takes days instead of hours, who cares? Rarely is someone setting up a data center under the gun (unless you're Elmo and we all saw how that went).
Factors like scalability and ongoing support are much more top of mind.
Not saying that Oxide can't address this, and I love Oxide's focus on the experience, but I think this bottom-up approach to convincing customers is going to be a steep climb..
But they seem to be up for steep climbs, so I wish them all the best!
Yeah I think this is the interesting question. My (naive, uninformed) interpretation is that Oxide is betting that there is some area in the overlap of the venn diagram between "people who have reasons not to run their businesses on the public clouds" and "people who are not suits but technologists and care about the user experience of setting up and maintaining their infrastructure because they want to do it themselves / without hiring lots of people and service contracts".
I'm not sure how big that space is, or whether it is likely to grow or shrink over time, but I'm intrigued by the proposition they're testing here!
I wonder if we'll see this space you describe grow as AI startups and scaleups - or even internal departments in large enterprises - start to increase in number...
I know there's already plenty of concerns about giving cloud-based AI services access to corporate data, so maybe there's a growing market there..
I mean... it went quite well all considering? There was some site instability for a brief period of time and now it's back to working normally. The initial hypothesis was that the data center was vital and so couldn't be shut down quickly. Turns out the hypothesis was incorrect. So I'm not quire sure that makes the point you're trying to make.
Of course Twitter is definitely not all use cases, so trying to generalize from one data point isn't a great idea in general.
I was making a bit of a joke there, sorry. It was more about the rather rare scenario of setting up a data centre in a hurry than about the long-term quality of the result.
Elmo's experiment came to mind so I tossed it in there.
They pay other people to do that and they don't really care if it's a miserable time. And if it takes days instead of hours, who cares? Rarely is someone setting up a data center under the gun (unless you're Elmo and we all saw how that went).
Factors like scalability and ongoing support are much more top of mind.
Not saying that Oxide can't address this, and I love Oxide's focus on the experience, but I think this bottom-up approach to convincing customers is going to be a steep climb..
But they seem to be up for steep climbs, so I wish them all the best!