What puzzles me about your comment is that you don't directly refute what Dasil003 was saying, which is that the technology didn't actually work, that from the customer perspective the execution was "mediocre at best".

I'm sure he's a bright and likable guy, and from his resume I figure he must be an inspiring leader. But for me, being a great technologist is all about things actually working, about users actually getting served. Sure, one should fail a lot in the lab, and sure, startups should be trying enough things that some just don't have product/market fit. But that's very different to me than promising the moon and delivering stuff that doesn't actually work.

During my time there, the stuff was amazingly solid. It was Solaris, not Linux, with a heavy dose of NetBSD ports. The customer support was the best in the biz too, but only the larger customers really saw that.

There were always those legacy customers from years before who had there stuff running on some boxes in an old datacenter that only a few of the original staff knew about, and required continuous care and attention. Ihere's a business lesson to learn there - if you sell a "lifetime" subscription for a product that will become obsolete, you'll pay a lifetime PR cost in the future when you can't continue with that product.

Coming from a pretty long Linux background, Solaris took some getting used to, but once I figured it out, it really was a better, more solid, better engineered solution. But Linux has a huge community - the people that loved Solaris are the old Unix graybeards, and that community wasn't growing.

Before my time, there were some debacles, such as a storage platform product that ended up losing data, but by the time I was there, they had learned the lessons, and I'll still say their core stack is still superior to any Linux based stack used in the datacenter today. It's been 4 years since I worked there.

Interesting. Thanks for the further details.

In their shoes I think the lesson I would learn is "don't go back on a deal". They could have returned the money, transitioned people to another product, shifted people to a different vendor, or offered people the option of any of the three. I don't think it was initially a PR problem; it was bad behavior, unilaterally breaking a promise, that got them in hot water.