

How Rackspace lost its mojo - jason_tko
http://venturebeat.com/2014/09/03/how-rackspace-lost-its-mojo/

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programminggeek
I'm not sure that Rackspace lost their mojo so much as the market shifted away
from owning/renting servers.

The low end market is more interesting at Digital Ocean or Linode, and the
massive scale stuff feels like Amazon still owns that, so I'm not really sure
where Rackspace is fantastic.

If service is what makes Rackspace best in the world, then they need to play
that card as hard as they can instead of chasing "markets" like the "open
cloud". Chasing markets sort of killed Sun and it could easily kill Rackspace.

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sloop
I don't think the market shifted away from owning/renting servers (IaaS?) - I
think part of the shift was from web-based startups and companies having just
development teams to having "devops" teams. Devops replaces the managed
service that Rackspace hung its hat on.

~~~
programminggeek
Sure, I meant that I believe in the past you would like purchase or lease a
server with a long term contract and they would build it for you and put it in
their racks. Now, that pretty much goes away and you just rent on an hourly
basis. That is a pretty big shift from signing contracts and ordering machines
that used to be much more common.

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snowwrestler
Rackspace has already figured this out.

It's really not that hard to understand: you choose Rackspace if you want
someone to call when you have a question or problem. That's true whether you
buy a dinky cloud server or a dedicated network segment with 30 leased boxes.
Everything comes with full phone and ticket support now.

If you don't care about that--if you just want some VMs to run your shit--
you'll go with DO or Linode on the low end, AWS, Google, or Azure on the high
end. Or maybe PaaS like Heroku.

Rackspace has only "lost their mojo" in that they are not a utility cloud
provider, which is what Wall Street is hot on right now. But they're a
profitable company with good customer loyalty and good technology.

