God why do startup sites suck so much?
Why do I need ChatGPT to cut through the marketing speak to understand what they are actually selling?
I literally spent 5 minutes in the site trying to understand before giving up and asking GPT...
Maybe I'm old-school, but I clicked on the logo in the top left, then read the first sentence which reads "On-demand elastic resources", which gives me some idea about what it is, and then later it says "A rack-scale system, built true to cloud architecture, that you can own and operate in your data center." which makes me 100% understand what the product is.
Do new internet users not know that the landing page usually contains information about the product they're talking about in their blog posts? 99% of the cases you can find what you're looking for on the landing page, and it took me a whole of 30 seconds to get here, writing this comment took longer time.
The hardware isn't elastic, obviously. But if a IT department sets up a Oxide rack, then the software development department can get the same sort of "on-demand 'elastic' resources" provisioned in that rack. I think that's what they're getting at. But yeah, obviously hardware itself can't be on-demand.
By that metric even VMware's vSphere with its abominable excuses for APIs also count as elastic.
If you have to manage the hardware yourself, have to plan and pay for upfront for the maximum capacity you would need, and there are fixed limits you can hit and have to plan around yourself, it's not elastic.
They make giant rack scale computers for data centers, i think that's the best way to explain it quickly to someone with my background who's never been in a data center but has an imaginary idea of what they look like.
And then as a follow up you have to explain that
- they sell an entire rack full of servers
- they're the only ones that do this. Normally you have to buy all the pieces and put it together yourself, or pay someone to put it together for you but all the parts are kind of designed on their own by different companies so it's kind of a mess. Oxide makes one big rack with like 16-32 servers and it's all designed by them and just works, so you just plug it in and you have servers you can put a bunch of vms on. Oh and they're huge, each one literally costs like a million dollars
If you scroll past the marketing blurb, I think the rest of the main page explains in pretty clear and simple terms what their product is. What did you find confusing about it?
Cool 1999 aesthetics though