(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.

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.

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.

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.

Lots of people want to buy our stuff!