I guess you're actually saying that despite their claims otherwise, you don't believe they did predict it?
The truth that I think they are trying to hide is that they are losing adoption to their Amazon-backed competitor and that they will bleed more customers if they don’t go open source again.
I think that when they made the original decision to change the license they thought their product had more pull than it really did. They thought customers would leave Amazon’s managed product for their “superior” product rather than Amazon’s “inferior” fork. They thought people wouldn’t trust Amazon to have the expertise to continue development. In reality what customers wanted was a managed solution from their cloud provider, they didn’t really care if it was Elastic or not.
I totally understand that the situation was a pickle for Elastic in terms of being able to be a sustainable company and perhaps they had to do something. But the thing they did didn’t work, or else they would have stuck with it.
In my experience companies that modify the licensing of their products or get bought by bad stewards like IBM (Hashicorp) or Progress (Chef Software) scare away the engineering managers who make purchase decisions.
I can't believe they didn't predict that this exact outcome would happen: Amazon forks under a more permissive license and becomes the new standard instead of Elastic because the entire package (managed service from AWS + more permissive license) is a lower risk package to the average business.