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 http://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.