For what it’s worth, there’s a somewhat common view at least in the Linux community that it’s important for hardware vendors to make their tech stack targetable from the office or home. This isn’t to be polite or to make money — it’s to foster adoption among developers, which drives sales.
Some examples:
x86 owned the desktop, workstation and laptop world for a long time. So everyone targeted x86, which made x86 the default in the datacenter. It was hard for ARM to break in and it mostly happened when AWS did it by fiat. If ARM had made some loss-leader actually useful laptops and workstations available, it might have happened sooner.
But x86 largely didn’t deploy AVX-512 in client machines, so people who wrote libraries only used it for fun or benchmarking, so it wasn’t widely used, and most users flubbed it anyway. (And might have gotten it right if they had the hardware on their desk.)
People target Nvidia datacenter GPUs. But people have targeted them for a long time, because they have them in their gaming machines too.
Xilinx used to push free academic gear quite hard, because that was a big lead into people learning how to use their gear.
So, if I were giving Oxide straightforward sales advice, absolutely don’t get distracted with small systems. But maybe, if Oxide thought of it as lead generation, Oxide should do it anyway. If I could buy something small enough to be affordable but big enough to be useful [0], I might get one. And I’d target it with my own stuff, and fix bugs, and evangelize it at little cost to Oxide.
[0] For me, maybe 100-150TB of spinning rust (or cheap NVMe or the ability to attach a JBOD), plus anywhere from 4-64 cores, in a format that works on 120V and fits in, say, 16U or less, at a credible price point, would be quite likely to net Oxide a sale. (Just one sale but still!) It could be sold as a developer thing, and there would be absolutely no expectation that it would perform like the real thing. If I found it awesome, I might buy a couple more. But I would also use it and make things work on it and talk about it, and if a whole bunch of people did this, Oxide might get a bunch of real sales.
(Also, I get the idea behind two SKUs, but can buyers at least configure storage and compute separately? Different workloads need radically different ratios.)