I responded to parent; I am slowly moving towards that announcement that I've been talking about. I mean, the new folks (srn and adp) are not that different from me in terms of values, so I obviously don't want or need (and am not really competent with) corporate-speak, but I do want to come up with something that focuses more on the business and less on my own personal issues (and this note, well, focuses more on the personal issues. While I think it's probably appropriate within this thread, it's me whining on a personal level, working through my issues, not me making an announcement about the company.)

I like the idea of sort-of serializing the 'post-mortem' parts of the story; going through my diary and emails and writing up buisness-level and technical incident reports; enough time has passed for most of these that assuming I leave off names, it shouldn't be too embarrassing for anyone.

Totally got it, thanks, Luke! I would love to read that. =)

I don't hate it, but that's a really crowded and competitive market, uh?

:-)

This is something else I want to write about. Starting a really different service is a lot harder to sell, and I knew going in that selling is what I am worst at.

Also, when I started, most of the competition was using UML or OpenVZ. Xen was unquestionably superior to those technologies for multi tenant systems, so one could argue that this market wasn't as crowded in 2005

Of course, I was big into the idea of a commodity product. Like I said, competing as a commodity requires less marketing skill. Instead of talking someone into trying something new, you start with something they already are using and then just point out the advantages of your implementation, which can be as simple as the blog I posted in the other comment.