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Comment by lkasjdas | Hacker News Reader

Every single Oxide article has comments about people wanting one at home.

A great example of completely misdirected marketing and/or engineering. Oxide should have developed home microcomputers, and they would have sold like cupcakes, with their ASCII art marketing. Instead they do million dollar "mainframes" that no one (except VCs) wants to buy.

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(I think you meant "like hotcakes", not "like cupcakes"?)

In any event: from the beginning, we have always been targeted at the enterprise buyer who is looking at annual public cloud bills in the tens, hundreds or (in some cases) thousands of millions of dollars per year. We love the enthusiasm that Oxide engenders among the home lab set, but that's not how we have geared the business (for lots of good reasons).

Also, for whatever it's worth: people do want to buy them, it turns out.

I’d really love to know a ballpark price on a minimal install without wasting anyone’s time, have you guys ever discussed real numbers on the podcast? I listen occasionally but definitely haven’t heard every episode.

The first generation was around $500K; due to the DRAM shortage the second generation is probably $1M or more.

This comment is a great example of completely misunderstanding… everything?

Just because a few people on a niche tech site are excited by niche tech stuff doesn’t mean you should focus your entire business on them, and the implication that you’d be successful in marketing a consumer product with ASCII art is mind blowing.

Homelab tinkerers are essentially a non-market. They barely want to pay for the cheapest commodity hardware. Tens of individuals would buy Oxide racks or theoretical microcomputers with their own money.

Unfortunately yes. I would realistically pay about $10K for a MicroOxide rack, because that’s what I can justify spending on what is essentially a hobby. I know that’s never, ever going to happen.

> Homelab tinkerers are essentially a non-market.

Sadly, I agree.

> They barely want to pay [...]

Not so! I've conservatively dropped $10k on my homelab so far, and have cobbled together a passable VM host/network/home-auto system in a half-rack. I would happily have paid more for an integrated (hypothetical) MicroOx! As fun as it is to play with cage nuts and to crimp cables, I love doinking around with a functional system even more.

There must be literally dozens of us out there...

i.e. enthusiasts. The cheapest, most demanding, the loudest and least loyal customers.

I'm sure they have done plenty of market research, and that research probably indicates that enthusiasts who buy server racks are a much smaller market than large enterprise users that need easily scalable on-prem resources.

Lots of people saying "I would love this" is not a profitable market. There are a lot of implicit assumptions in that phrase. Would you buy the lowest level rack for $100k, paying extra for any support? (I don't have any insight into actual pricing, but I know enterprise consumers don't bat an eyelid at prices like that.)

If not then maybe the "I would love this" is not relevant for a real market.

While I'm fascinated by Oxide, their style and work culture (if open documents are to be believed), I do think you're misunderstanding the homelab people a lot. Yes, I want the chance to play with an actual Oxide hardware in the same sense I'd want to touch a mainframe from the 80s. In the end though this is an extremely opinionated piece of tech that doesn't really invite or support tinkering. And homelab is about building something that no sane production-grade maker would ever be doing, so selling to this market would be quite an insane business venture.

Lots of people want to buy our stuff!

Favorited. Assuming this comment must be satire.

This is the perfect example of a delusional HN comment. None of it makes any sense, most notably the idea that VCs are buying any of this server hardware.

It's so bad I can only guess that it's purposefully so. "sell like cupcakes"????

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