yte14

Again, I’m not basing what I’m saying solely on the conference example. I’m not arguing over the psychology of multiple conference conversations from ten years ago any further because it’s completely immaterial to my point (and one example of many; the point of the example was that it was openly discussed among competition, not “let’s go to the mat on what constitutes an actual opinion with the assumption that I don’t perceive conversation appropriately”).

I wasn’t talking about the general public. I was talking about the incumbents. I said competitors, not customers, and that wasn’t a corrected typo.

Edit: I responded to something that’s now been silently edited out and replaced with “others”.

I don’t understand how that impacts my point at all. If an opinion is only held in one context it’s not actually held? Is that what you’re saying? I’m sorry, I don’t follow.

Before DO VPS was (and somewhat remains) a community even among competition. I’m not basing what I’m saying solely on the example given.

I remember Linode being hesitant to dip below $20 because the thinking was that it would diminish the quality of support. That thinking was reinforced when you started with $10 (if I recall, it’s been nearly a decade) and we started getting large numbers of refugees burned by experiences with your support organization. Neighboring comments tell me it’s still a problem. We consciously didn’t want to grow $5 fast because we didn’t have capital to throw at any problem that developed. We, the market, not just Linode, also knew competing to the bottom on price largely relegated shared/cpanel/etc hosting to $0.99 commodity status and we weren’t keen to kick off such a war for obvious reasons. (That was quite prescient, looking back from outside in 2021.)

Anyway, yes, you eventually reached a position where you dictated the pricing structure, slightly annoyingly because it was a product that looked remarkably similar to ours (down to the incentivized Linode Library clone that’s getting praise elsewhere in this thread). I wasn’t talking about changes you forced. The entire product top to bottom was referenced against Linode’s work to grow you to a position to force those changes. Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I’m also not going after you for it; I’m only responding to fantastic product idea.

It’s just odd that when competitors would ask me my thoughts on the “Linode clone” at 2011-era conferences that’s something that’s news to you. Is that really not apparent to an executive? If not that you did so, at least that seemingly the entire incumbency, not just Linode, thought so?

The thesis of DigitalOcean was literally “this very established market needs a venture capital growth play because we saw Slicehost exit to Rackspace”. In the beginning the entirety of DO’s offering, tech for tech, was almost a direct lift of Linode and, as they scaled, made all the same technical mistakes and learning experiences that Linode did.

I guess you could call that a fantastic product idea. I’d call it applying an aggressive exit strategy to Chris Aker’s fantastic product idea from 2003 and further commoditizing said product in its wake.