Thread by @QuinnyPig

Man, if you ever needed more proof that the markets aren't rational, consider that @rackspace IPOd today and only lost 22% of its value.

A thread.

For a long time, @Rackspace was the kind of company you'd see in magazine advertisements and think "someday, if I get good at computers, maybe I could work there."

Then something changed over there. Blame PE, blame the industry, but something shifted.

In the past year they terminated hosting for a bunch of FOSS projects, *failed to tell them*, and then sent them Surprise Bills.

They also started charging fees for idle accounts.

And they laid off some of the best people in the industry.

I get that "cloud" is a weird, disruptive thing. But somehow @rackspace has gone from "aspirational company worth admiring" to "honestly I hope they go out of business."

When they bought @OnicaGroup I reached out to friends with 'I'm so sorry" and nobody corrected me.

Now they're selling "Multi-Cloud management" as if that were a thing serious people actually want.

Goodwill, talent, market position. They've squandered all of them.

Go to rackspace.com and try to buy something, anything. I'll wait.

The entire message of the page could be summed up as "yes, we do that too" to a point where there's absolutely no call to action.

That isn't a webpage designed to convert anyone into a customer.

When I was doing my series of threads on "spin up a VM in a bunch of cloud providers and livetweet it" I tried to do one for @rackspace. I couldn't figure out how to actually sign up, or which service to use, so I gave up.

Now they talk about their trademark, "Fanatical Experience."

What is @rackspace fanatical *about*? It's clearly not customers, partners, staff, the open source community, their investors, or the industry. What's left?

I'm not even able to snark about them properly--I'm just sad. @rackspace has become the shambling husk of a once-great company filled with passionate and dedicated people.

Scratch that, I found something. Their S-1 filing has to list their "Named Executive Officers" for fiscal year 2019. @rackspace lists 8, 5 of whom have left the company.

I don't believe "I bet that's a great ship now that all of those rats are gone!" is the proper view.

Oh my god I can't make this up: as of the time of this writing their Twitter bio demonstrates that they can't even *SPELL* Multi-Cloud, let alone execute on it.

At this point "we are listed as a reference customer on @rackspace's website" is borderline required to be disclosed as a risk factor in a bunch of companies' next 10-Q filings.

Oh, one more thing. Next month their CEO Kevin Jones gets his last $2.5 million of his 18 months of $10 million signing bonus. His requirements for this are "don't quit voluntarily."

He started in April and made $28 million last year.

I mean good for him; he was singlehandedly making almost a third of @rackspace's 2019 $102.3 million net loss.