>* You buy your own servers instead of renting, which is what most people are doing now. They argue there's a case for this, but it seems like a shrinking market. Everything has gone cloud.

This is very much not true and seems to be a result of people in the valley thinking the rest of the world operates like the valley. In the rest of the world I've found mature businesses that bought into the "cloud is the best" quickly started doing the math on their billing rate and realized there is a VERY small subset of their business that has any reason to be in the cloud. Actually one of the very best use-cases of public cloud I've seen is a finance firm that sticks new products into the cloud until they hit maturity so they can properly right-size the on-prem permanent home for them. And if those products never take off, they just move on to the next one. They're willing to pay a premium for 12-18 months because they can justify it financially.

>* Even if there are lots of people who want to leave the cloud, all their data is there. That's how they get you -- it costs nothing to bring data in and a lot to transfer it out. So high cost to switch.

And yet company's do it all the time. I think you'll again find mature fortune 500s can do the math on the exit cost vs. staying cost and quickly justify leaving in a reasonable time window.

>* AWS and others provide tons of other services in their clouds, which if you depend on you'll have to build out on top of Oxide. So even higher cost to switch.

And as you've seen plenty of people here point out: most of those services tend to be overrated. OK, so you've got database as a service: except now you can't actually tune it to your specific workload. And $/query, even ignoring performance, is astronomically higher than building your own and paying a DBA to manage it unless you're a 2-man startup.

>* Even though you bought your own servers, you still have to run everything inside VMs, which introduce the sort of issues you would hope to avoid by buying your own servers! Why is this? Because they're building everything on Illumos (Solaris) which is for all practical purposes is dead outside Oxide and delivering questionable value here.

I don't know of a single enterprise that has run anything BUT VMs for the last decade. Other than Mainframe (which you can argue is actually just VMs in a different name), and some HFT-type applications that need the lowest possible latency at all costs, it's all virtualized. As for Illumos: why do you care? Oxide is supporting and maintaining it as an appliance. Tape has been "dead" for 2 decades. FreeBSD has been "dead" since the early 2000s. It's only dead for people that don't deal with enterprise IT.

>* Based on blogs/twitter/mastodon they have put a lot of effort into perfecting these weird EE side quests, but they're not making real new hardware (no new CPU, no new fabric, etc). I am skeptical any customers will notice or care and would have not noticed had they used off the shelf hardware/power setups.

I have no doubt they've done their research, and I can tell you from my industry experience there is a large cross-section of people who want an easy button. There's a reason why companys like Nutanix exist and have the market cap they do - but they could never actually get the whole way there because they got wrapped up in the "everything is software defined!!!". Which works really well until you realize that you're left to your own devices on networking.

>So you have to be this ultra-bizarre customer, somebody who wants their own servers, but doesn't mind VMs, doesn't need to migrate out of the cloud but wants this instead of whatever hardware they manage themselves now, who will buy a rack at a time, who doesn't need any custom hardware, and is willing to put up with whatever off-the-beaten path difficulties are going to occur because of the custom stuff they've done that's AFAICT is very low value for the customer. Who is this? Even the poster child for needing on prem, the CIA is on AWS now.

I mean no disrespect but I get the impression you haven't ever worked with a fortune 500 that's outside of the valley. This is EXACTLY what they all want. They aren't going to run their entire datacenter on this, but when the datacenter is measured in hundreds to thousands of servers, they've got plenty of workloads that it's a perfect fit for