Was Rackspace's trouble because of the auction, or just because of the company and market conditions? (In hindsight, August 2008 was probably not the ideal time for an IPO.) If they had done a regular IPO, might they just have had trouble selling all the offered shares at the set price?

(These are all honest questions, just to be sure. I have no preconceived idea what the answers might be! I'm not clued up enough to argue with rhetorical questions on this stuff.)

Not sure. I know Google's IPO was during a time that wasn't favorable, but it also had a strong B2C brand, which would have biased investors and made the auction more favorable.

Part of the service the banks are supposed to provide is to help with timing the IPO. (I have no idea how good they are at doing that, though).