“We are shipping our first racks by the end of the year.” (oxide.computer in 2020)
“We are shipping our first racks by the end of the year.” (LinkedIn in 2023)
I’ve been watching 0xide like a hawk (even if I cannot stand to listen to even a single full podcast of them stroking each other) because Brian Cantrill has basically been given a “blank check” to make whatever he wants and so he created 0xide. I’m like, “Let’s see what this amazing dude can do with ulimited VC power mixed with a cautious love of Rust?” The premise of 0xide is great and the choice of Rust for most things bold—especially given the absolute lunacy exhibited by the Rust governance board of late. So 0xide’s success is fundamentally linked to the success of Rust (assuming they kept Rust and didn’t move to C, which Brian loves). The fate of 0xide itself will be a huge commentary on the Rust language itself.
Here are the facts:
As of May 2023, 0xide makes nothing but very expensive vaporware and the climate since its initial product line design has dramatically changed.
Will companies even care about 0xide’s products if and when they ship anything? No. No, they won’t. There is little to no demand for the products 0xide is making, but they seem to have a bunch of very profitable, but dumb venture capitalist completely fooled (as usual). Their products make absolutely no sense (from a business perspective) to any enterprise CTO. Just the required ongoing support and maintenance contracts will be enough to make any established enterprise shudder with fear—especially when RedHat and Amazon have solid offerings in that space and are much better capitalized with longer track records—even with Rust (think Firecracker). Even MS is a safer bet than this upstart. Sure a few outliers will use 0xide just to be different and cool but that won’t last for the price they will have to charge for them. Sadly, nothing 0xide is offering is original.
I was really holding out hope for 0xide as a company but that hope has been overshadowed by their missed targets and growing irrelevance. Like so many other golden-tongue, bullshitting, Silicon Valley sophists, Brian Cantrill is turning out to be yet another well-educated, fast-talking, charlatan (and I think he knows it). It makes me very sad to say it. I really like Brian, he’s one of the few who truly grasp the disaster of the 90s OOP scene. He gets it more often than not. I sincerely hope I’m wrong. It doesn’t help that I recently read his glowly praise for Isaac Schueler (whom I despise for many very objective reasons), or learned that completely horrible mismanagement of the Node.s project that led to the io.js fork was under Brian’s direction at Joyent (which proved to be a mosterously disastereous company and typical SV VC cash grab), or noticed that a lot of the people involved in that io.js lunacy are now involved in the Rust governance idiocy.
One objective principle that this all does solidify is that one cannot go wrong looking for the people who tend to be too busy getting actual shit done (like Steve Wozniak) rather than talking about getting shit done (like Steve Jobs). They are just a lot harder to find.
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