One of the amazing shifts in the last 20 years was realizing that commodity hardware, when deployed correctly, could do the job.
Metaphorical fans, but also fans, and everything else. It was an example from the blog post. I looked at that super innovative and cool backplane. Sure, warranty covers it for the first N years, but then what? What happens when things turn into a Tesla situation and you get horror stories of delays and poor results?
I think 'commodity' is generalized at this point. Given the choice of Supermicro and Oxide. I'm going to pick Supermicro. They can deliver me a clean rack of machines too. Why would I go with Supermicro? Big company, lots of products, lots of choices, I can work with them to get what I want.
Oxide is too singular. It is one rack, one design, one set of specifications. Don't get me wrong, there is some value in that... and I'm sure you'll sell plenty of hardware, but I'm not finding the value in it for myself. That's the part that I mean by 'commodity'.
If you're buying millions of this stuff, what says that you're going to get support for it in 5 years. Who knows... maybe Cisco wakes up and gives them an offer they can't refuse and then shuts down the company.
By the way, people endlessly gripe about Google deprecating things and that's just software...
My two cents is that this isn't really an innovation business model, it's an execution business model. Their proposition seems to be that they can execute a a server rack with integrated hardware and open-source software so well that customers will love their product.
Maybe they'll just end up with tons of nerds our there thinking, "I really wish I could justify investing in Oxide racks, but it just doesn't make sense for my business / I just can't sell it to my CIO", but hey, maybe not!
