The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’ • Hacker News Board

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#111

Post by tablespoon » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

> Remember the old Rackspace and its famous commitment to “Fanatical Support?” Highly trained people handled the company’s incoming telephone and online inquiries, priding themselves on quick responses and fast solutions.

That spends money to create a good reputation, which is an asset that some MBA type will later be tempted to burn to create $$$ for the short-term gain of shareholders. My understanding is private equity has a very well-developed process to do that.

Aaaand Rackspace was acquired by private equity in 2016:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/26/rackspace-to-go-private-af...

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#112

Post by jrootabega » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 4:19 PM UTC

jrootabega wrote: post #62

brk wrote: post #31

I had been a Rackspace customer a few times at various roles. I never experienced this "fanatical support" on anything that mattered. After several outages where we received pathetic root-cause reports initially, and had to push them hard to provide actual data, and clear commitments to shore up their systems, I would describe them as "fanatical liars". It is funny, just the other day my wife and I were discussing cl…

In my experience, the story with companies like this, with images like this, is that's it's almost always lying marketing/incorrect customer belief long, long, long before it's widely recognized. It's not a question of them degrading; it's a question of enough people realizing it, or them screwing up enough to get wider coverage. I was not happy with Rackspace's service something like 9-10 years ago, and the story I…

And you can see they are always trying to control this message.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#113

Post by snowwrestler » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 4:19 PM UTC

CreepGin wrote: post #100

snowwrestler wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rackspace was never the most affordable; their differentiator was service. Digital Ocean had very little to do with their decline. The biggest factor was the shift in corporate mindset from “we need to operate our own servers” to “we need to orchestrate services running on someone else’s servers.” Probably AWS is most to blame for that. Rackspace tried to make the jump across that chasm several times but they were tr…

> Digital Ocean had very little to do with their decline. From my personal experience, Digital Ocean did pull away a lot of indie devs and small businesses away from Rackspace. Those folks did not need most of the features of AWS. They just needed simple cloud servers and maybe some load balancers. My own small business used Rackspace in 2010 to 2013 ($5k per month op cost). When DO came to our radar, it was dead sim…

Digital Ocean was just too late and too small to carry much blame for Rackspace’s decline in hosting. Even as recently as 2021, DO revenue was $120 million vs almost $3 billion at Rackspace.

Play around with various hosting company names in Google Trends if you want to see how interest changed over time.

I’m not saying DO is bad, far from it. But it’s more accurate to say that they benefited from trends that were well underway before they had significant market presence.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#114

Post by seanstev » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

sickmate wrote: post #108

hzbxks wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rackspace never had a "shared hosting" product outside of a very short lived acquisition of mosso from like 2007-2008....

It might have been called something else like cloud hosting, but it was definitely equivalent to a shared hosting model. We didn't manage the web servers, no root access etc and the database server was shared between 300+ of their customers.

cloud sites. The product was bought out by liquid web about 10 years ago, if I remember correctly.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#115

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 4:25 PM UTC

debarshri wrote: post #98

rrdharan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems pretty sketchy from a data access perspective.

You will be surprised how much digitalocean has access in your cloud infra. We had a support ticket, the support person could see all our pods, namespace and kubernetes objects, disk mounts etc.

[deleted]

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#116

Post by lowbloodsugar » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 4:28 PM UTC

alt227 wrote: post #10

rob74 wrote: post #7

> Don’t expect Rackspace to ever fully recover from Friday’s meltdown. The 1.2 million-square-foot headquarters in Windcrest is now for sale. The remnants of the company will soon decamp to less than 10% of that space, in a smaller office building near Stone Oak. A company stock that soared to about $80 a share in early 2013 fell from about $5 a share Dec. 2, when the meltdown hit the wires, to $3.23 as of Friday’s m…

Rackspace have many divisions and revenue streams, Exchange being a small part of their overall business. They have many thousands of customers still using their other products that are completely unaware of whats going on in Exchange right now. I mean, it didnt even make HN front page! Rackspace will not die from this, they will plod along as a reseller for other clouds for many years to come.

Er, well this is the second time it’s hit the front page so

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#117

Post by tristor » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 4:34 PM UTC

I worked at Rackspace from 2010 to 2014, and left on very good terms. I know many people who stayed well after I did. Private Equity killed Rackspace. They had a great product, a great team, a healthy war chest, and a good business with good margins.

They were purchased by Private Equity which took a $5B company and turned it into a $1B company, after laying off all the US-based staff, sending all the support jobs to India, destroying the brand, ruining their most innovative product offers, and loading the company up with unnecessary debt.

I saw the writing on the wall, which is why I left just a few scant months prior to the buy-out. I still wish it hadn't happened. Rackspace (of that era) was the best place I ever worked in my entire career, and I still remain close friends with many of my former coworkers. I grew immensely as a technologist and a person through my time at Rackspace, and I learned to love customers and love supporting customers in a way I never thought possible having done my time earlier in my life in retail. Rackspace was something really unique and it's sad to see what's happened to it due to greed and stupidity from the shareholders and the PE firm that bought it.

One of the coolest things that happened to me was being on third-shift near the end of my shift the same morning that Lanham appeared on a talk show as he did sometimes. As he always would, he'd get them to live-dial Rackspace Support from the number on the website. At the time, Rackspace did not use phone trees or first-line, everyone was in the queue to take calls off the main number and transfer if needed. I picked up the phone on the 2nd ring (he always said, and it was true, you'd get a /real person/ with /real knowledge/ in less than 3 rings) and suddenly was talking to the CEO on air. Was super cool and a good way to the end the shift.

To go from that level of support, to get an extremely senior sys-admin (I was one of several people at Rackspace that was a "double L3" during my time there, reaching seniority in both Windows & Linux systems administration), within 3 rings, who can just solve your problem, even at 2AM, to what they have now getting stuck in phone-tree hell before being transferred to a time-waster with a script in India who'll eventually hang up on you is truly horribly sad. Private Equity has ruined SO MUCH value in the American economy, and it isn't a new phenomenon.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#118

Post by hooverd » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 4:36 PM UTC

teekert wrote: post #55

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would a "use this slide at your own risk" sign be enough to prevent any lawsuits?

This is so a US thing. In my country an adult is just expected to be able to look at a slide, judge it as dangerous, have te freedom to do it anyway, receive medial help if needed, feel the shame, experienced a learning moment. Get laughed at, Laugh about it. In the US there is always a lawsuit and it's someone's fault. It always feels like a not-so-nice place to be. Then again it makes for great lawyer and medical s…

Sometimes a lawsuit is justified. There was a water slide in KCK that decapitated a kid in 2016. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verr%C3%BCckt#Fatal_incident

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#119

Post by jlokier » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 4:42 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #43

tmountain wrote: post #39

I visited them during the peak of their success and they had a giant stainless steel slide in the middle of their facility that had been given to them by the German government. It was steep and twisty, and I inquired about the liability of having it. With a grin, a staff member told me that several employees had broken bones using the slide and that there was an active lawsuit in progress with a former employee due t…

Would a "use this slide at your own risk" sign be enough to prevent any lawsuits?

A photo is captioned "A Rackspace employee alleges her then-19-month-old son fractured his left tibia after his foot got caught on the inside of the slide while riding it on March 1, 2013."

Even a slide that looks twisty, fast and adventerous must have something wrong with it if your foot can get caught on the way down. Properly manufactured slides don't have things you can catch your foot on going down.

Visual inspection from the outside won't reveal that. It looks like something a reasonable person will assume is a properly manufactured slide, and make their personal safety assessment based on how twisty and steep it looks.

Perhaps "we know some people catch their foot on something on the way down which you can't see just by looking from the outside, and someone broke their leg because of it, so use at your own risk but be warned of this non-obvious risk" would be more appropriate?

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#120

Post by tristor » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

sredevops wrote: post #88

bluedino wrote: post #87

They were definitely not cheap, but looking back, $249 for a low-end server plus the expertise you got was well worth it. They had some people that really knew their stuff back then. But by 2010, 2011, it started to fade. They physically lost one of our servers and it took 2 hours to power cycle our stack (the firewall they provided is actually what died). We wanted to double our RAM from 16GB to 32GB. It would have…

Right before they went public, they started to outsource a lot of their support. It looked like lipstick on a pig.

There was never any support outsourced while I was there from 2010-2014. They originally went public in 2008. That is just not true. Everyone in support sat physically in an office other than a few very senior folks that worked from home. Most were in San Antonio, some were in Austin, some in London, a few folks for LATAM were in Mexico City and Costa Rica, and folks for the BENELUX team were in Amsterdam. We also had a small office attached to the datacenter in Hong Kong and Sydney, Australia for support in APJC. Most support was US-based, regardless of customer location, and we did a shifted model rather than follow the sun.

There was never any point until after they were acquired by Private Equity in 2015 that Rackspace outsourced any part of its support pipeline, including specialty support (databases, sharepoint, exchange, etc).