Sometimes the hype exists for a good reason - as a paying enterprise Tailscale customer, I’ll fight you if you ever suggest I have to staff people to admin an IPsec or SSL-based VPN again.

1. It's not clear the market case closes, because while there are customers who would greatly benefit from their systems, those same customers are also very averse to change, meaning that most of them will probably sit out for the first few generations to see if they have staying power. If everyone does that, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

2. ... but this would have been fine, a few years ago. It's not fine in the current market situation, where there is much less easy money looking for a place to go. I sure hope they are sitting on a long runway.

3. Speaking of, they are very late in their execution. A SM4 platform that only shipped in 2023 is not great. I really hope they are far along on their SP5 development. (... But this also dampens current sales. I bet a lot of potential customers are thinking that a SP5 Oxide Rack seems a much more appealing than a SP4 one, so why not wait?)

But the reason they are not discussed that much is that people who understand the market are all really, really hoping that they pull it off. Because the current situation in server hardware is dire. In every thread people who don't know much about servers ask why not get a similar system from Dell or Supermicro or whoever. The answer is that the commodity servers are pieces of shit that requires significant local engineering resources to manage. Software quality of firmware is generally horrendous, and when this is pointed out to the vendors, their answer is that they know, but everyone else is just as bad, wontfix. A significant draw of the cloud is that all that pain goes away, because the hyperscalers realized how shit everything was and fixed it in their systems. It just never trickled down to the market below them.

Other then that, the code is open source. They also help sponsor both Rust and OpenFireware conferences.