Not sure if you're still here or will see this, but:
>It's easy to be confused by all of the professional ISP gear that Ubiquiti used to produce and think that the UniFi products (like the "Dream Machine") are professional networking equipment. Try blocking ubnt domains at your network edge losing the ability to log into UniFi ... you'll see how "professional" it is right away.
The 'dream machine'/UniFi OS stuff is real trash and maybe where the rot truly showed to have completely taken over, though there were very bad signs earlier like when they trashed their self-hosted video solution and reversed earlier promises to restrict the follow up to their proprietary hardware (CK G2). Worth clarifying though that it's still perfectly possible to have a full self-hosted controller with local accounts, multiple sites and zero greater internet dependencies (route management VLANs through wireguard back to the L3 controller). The UDMs are in no way necessary. Their problems are more fundamental than that :).
>I will also say that it is ironic, and sad, that you mention Supermicro as an alternative. Their recent moves make it quite clear that they are trying to move in the same direction ...
I'm genuinely curious what you mean by that? At your scale of course you have far more insight into businesses of that size, but I honestly haven't seen any signs of that on the SM side nor is it quite clear to me how they would even go about that? They just make systems don't they? Even their IPMI is based off the AST2k series BMC, and they've been extremely reasonable about what they offer there in stark contrast to players like HPE. Their systems also aren't packed with proprietary junk that punishes you the instant you try to do anything else, again in stark contrast to HPE. They're just computers. Of course I'm only in at the lower end of their spectrum of offerings!
>making wonderfully built products that fulfill useful (but boring) use-cases is never enough. Supermicro circa 2010 was making people rich but not billionaire rich ...
One of the particularly frustrating/outright confusing things about Ubiquiti FWIW is that this isn't actually true. Ubiquiti did in fact turn Pera into a billionaire just by making wonderful products that fulfilled important use cases, and there were clear and loudly suggested natural revenue opportunities that they never even bothered with. Looking at all of their shitty moves and self-destruction, it actually doesn't generally have any sort of revenue ties! And indeed on the contrary, they've repeatedly skipped out on (accepted even) features that would flat out encourage more hardware sales and revenue (like L2 replicants to L3 control). They've actively spent major money and development time on things that people hate yet are completely free. It's not like all those new ever worse Controller versions actually are paid. It's not like they've added subscriptions and microtransactions everywhere. Even their cloud stuff again doesn't actually have any revenue story attached. They made a big deal about offering one of the most classic super high margin boosting things of all, "Premium Business Support Contracts", and then... just kind of abandoned it and let it die out pissing off a ton of professionals and business in the process even though it could clearly print money.
It's not a matter of their being some cold money grubbing business logic to their moves that, however evil, one can understand the point of. There simply isn't any logic at all, beyond maybe trying to outsource so hard and create such a toxic environment that they literally just don't have the internal capability to execute on much of anything anymore. Outside of a few remaining decent people still plugging away a bit on bug fixes, most of the activity seems directionless, meetings and throwing stuff at the wall with no strategy or follow up, and ever widening set of products that sometimes get dropped before they are even out of "early access".
So yeah. If anything the Ubiquiti of old would be doing fantastically better right now just because demand for networking and everything related has accelerated so much. It's just so stupid.