I'm not sure what part of the title you think is misleading, and I definitely don't think anyone is being particularly unfair to Rackspace. On the plus side, I think it was a good idea to bring this change out in the open early, and for that I will give Rackspace credit. The problem is, they muffed the announcement so badly, I don't know how well they can recover from it. They seem to be so completely clueless of the type of customers that use Slicehost, it's no wonder they thought this kind of announcment was OK. I have never even heard the name Slicehost except from technical people who know exactly what they are doing. They want nothing more than a simple VPS (sometimes more than one VPS) they can bring up quickly, install exactly the way they want, and for the most part never have to deal with a tech support person unless there is a problem on the provider's side (and obviously, they'd prefer that to be almost never also). They don't want to be instructed on "two tectonic shifts happening in IT at the moment" -- these people
are IT, and they know exactly what is going on. They don't want to listen to the sales pitch about a "massively scalable cloud operating system", and then be told how the service as they know it now is going to cease to exist. Before you say that for most people things will stay close to the same, let me say this. Rackspace -- listen to your customers. Rackspace has an awful control panel. Current Slicehost customers
love its control panel. If the Slicehost control panel goes away, the service is
not close to the same. It is a big deal, and I think the number of people besides me saying the same thing speaks for itself. Promising "Oh, it's really important" and "We're working on it -- it's a high priority" isn't enough. People will switch over to another provider that
already has a nice control panel. If you want to keep these customers, you'd better get that fixed way before any migrations have to happen. And to be quite honest, I wonder how much time you really have to fix this before losing most of those who care about it.
Now, I freely admit that Rackspace may just not be terribly worried about small-time single VPS accounts (like mine). I don't have access to their customer list, and perhaps the number of customers in situations similar to mine is a much smaller percentage than I think it is (so perhaps I am the one who is clueless about Slicehost's customers). Maybe those of us in that category simply make the most amount of noise about this, and at the same time mean the least to Rackspace's bottom line. I'm not saying that is the case, I'm just saying that I don't know, but it could be a possibility. Mark's email certainly seemed to be targeted at corporate business types, who make decisions on where to spend technical money, but actually know very little about how technology works. That email contained the exact kind of jargon-filled spin that rubs Slicehost customers like me the wrong way. It certainly leads me to question whether Rackspace has just outgrown customers like me and is not particularly concerned if many of us switch providers.
You said "Unfortunately I think in hindsight I can say that our decision was probably the wrong call.". Well, know this -- I was a fairly new customer to Slicehost when the news came that Rackspace had bought Slicehost out. I was pretty disappointed, because I specifically did not want to use Rackspace based on the experience of others I knew who had used them. If Slicehost had not led me to believe that it was going to continue to exist as it was after the acquisition, I would not have remained a customer. Like many others, I was a bit skeptical, but was impressed enough by Slicehost that I wanted to stick around. And I've been 100% satisfied from then till now with Slicehost's service. Judging from the response I've seen here and elsewhere, I think a lot of other people would have switched away from Slicehost right after the acquisition, had you not made the call you did make then. So maybe you are too quick to question the decision. It could have meant a lot less revenue for the company since the acquisition.
I know that the Slicehost folks made a really big deal about how great they thought Rackspace was, and how the deal was really good for both companies, and that Rackspace was an equally great company. When you say "Trust me that these guys are really working for the best for you all.", I have to say that I'm at best much more skeptical than I was immediately after the acquisition.
I'm definitely going to be shopping around.