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!

> we all saw how that went

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.

Who is Elmo?