geekinthecorner's comments

It's amusing how every article about Puppet gets trolled by the Chef group. Is there ever a useful technology that doesn't inspire holy wars?

And please, just one e-mail. Don't let a rambunctious new marketing type decide "Hey, if we find our inactive users and email them two or three times a week from here on out we'll increase our user base". And make sure your unsubscribe features work.

Congratulations on shipping! I'm curious if after the setbacks, do you feel that YCombinator was the right model for a hardware start-up? I wonder if the exuberance and rapidity of the single web-app start-up lent itself towards overconfidence in your time schedules and understanding of time to market given the various manufacturing and design challenges?

Before you get to the point of scouting for deal you need to be able to show bank records proving you've grossed $200k/year (or $300k/year if you're married) for the previous two years, or have over $1m in assets. This is because our great grandparents got bilked, and as usual, we're paying for the sins of people who died before we were born.

These numbers were set by old white men in 1982 to make sure the only other old white men could invest in this manner. The same rich old white men, and their rich white children are now trying to adjust that for inflation, which would mean something like $450k/year in gross income or $2.5m in assets.

Look up Rule 501 of SEC's regulation D. Then smash something. I did.

Now if we could just get rid of Regulation D and make the accredited investors requirement sane enough that your average engineer could be allowed the opportunity to invest in the companies we believe in.

We can quibble on how you use it, but in the end, the goal is to own as much of the application hosting market as they possibly can. At least, if the cloud pundits are right, and if there can be only 2 or 3 utility computing companies in the end.

Because it's a war. A scrappy five year old company, Softlayer got bought out for $500m, merged with ThePlanet, and now SoftLayer is the first or second largest dedicated server company by sheer number of servers, and once all of TP is integrated with SL's automation, they'll most likely have the highest margins.

SL gets margins by being efficient whereas Rackspace gets margins by having an incredibly large and efficient sales team. SL is a hacker's hosting company which has made very solid progress selling to the enterprise.

To top that off, Salesforce just bought Heroku, telling the world that they really intend to compete in cloud hosting against Amazon, and any other clouds that matter (do any other clouds matter?). The competition is fierce, the stakes are high, and we're seeing an arms race. I wouldn't be surprised if HP got into the mix as well (there must be some reason they bought loudcloud and EDS beyond just rounding out their EYP division).

Any start-up who can help some of the big dedicated server firms (Softlayer, Rackspace, Peer1) either appear to be a sexy alternative to Amazon (to try and woo new startups, which is where all of the dedicated server companies are sort of lackluster, primarily due to a lack of advertising and a lack of a presence in the valley) has a high potential for acquisition in the next year. Look at the past three years of operations and cloud related start-ups. For example I'll be really surprised if either Puppet or Opscode are still independent entities in 2012.

Rackspace is desperately in need of as much help as they can get. Whereas the rest of the industry (Softlayer, etc) spent the last five years building out automated infrastructure, Rackspace spent it mostly on sales. As a customer with dozens of servers at Rackspace, and hundreds at Softlayer, the difference is night and day.

I feel bad for Cloudkick as a company, though. San Antonio is a million miles away from San Francisco, culturally. Good job on having an exit, good luck on not hating yourselves in a year.

Whenever I read a letter like the one Bartz wrote, I'm curious who the intended audience was, a board, or the employees.

"Margins have expanded. Revenue growth has stabilized after a long period of decelerating trends. "

That was definitely not written for any of Yahoo's employees.

In the 9 or 10 years since I first heard about OpenBSD, it has never come up in conversation without the related scene drama also popping up.