So, to dig into (and maybe stretch) one of your analogies a little bit:

> Tomato farmers make a profit selling tomatoes at a price much lower than the cost to grow tomatoes at home.

This is because at home, you have an elastic need for tomatoes. One week you need a few, the next week you need none, the next week you need a lot. In that case, yes, growing your own tomatoes would be very silly. (This part of the analogy works with on-demand instances.)

However, if you aren't a home, but you're a busy restaurant, you're not buying tomatoes from the grocery store. You have a regular, fairly fixed capacity, and so you go with a produce vendor who's able to serve that need at a decent price. Part of the reason you're able to get a cheaper price is through volume and due to the regular-ness of the business. (this part of the analogy works with reserved instances.)

Okay, so let's move from tomatoes to the actual building of a restaurant itself. Similar to a reserved instance, renting a building is a decent way to get started with less capital, and you have fairly consistent capacity requirements. But at some point, you realize what McDonalds did: owning the building and land beneath it ends up being a great deal at certain scale. Because that ends up being cheaper still, in the long run. This is closer to on-prem. (Okay at this point this analogy is getting pretty silly but it was fun to try and work through it...)

So, the trick is, for a lot of organizations, they could realize the benefits of owning their own hardware, but to get back to your original analogy, running your own hardware comes with its own set of costs that may make it not worth it. You have to have staff to operate everything, you have to manage all of the various supplier relationships, keep track of software licensing fees, etc etc etc. Even with all of this, as my sibling comment shows, often this can be cheaper than using the cloud.

But one way of looking at Oxide is, we are making it so that it's simpler to own your own hardware, thanks to all of the integration work we do. You don't have to manage a ton of vendor relationships, you have "one throat to choke," as they say. You don't have to keep track of software licensing fees, there are none. You don't need to build out your own software to put the whole thing together, we give it to you. Etc.

So yes, just like a household is best served by going to the supermarket, individuals aren't ever going to buy Oxide. But there's a lot more out there than just households. And larger organizations have fundamentally different needs than they do.

> The main reason people think their on-prem is cheaper than cloud is that they are bad at accounting.

I mean, there's also base accounting stuff that differs significantly between the two, like opex vs capex spend. Not that I'm an expert in that, mind you.

My comment wasn't really about Oxide, it's about the fallacy. A person can't succeed in life thinking they can do something cheaper on the sole basis that the other guy makes a profit. The much more likely explanation is that the other guy makes their profit by being much, much better than you.

To stretch the metaphor to a grotesque extent, I think Oxide stands in the middle between the home-grown and the industrial tomato. Your average corporate IT installation has the same economics as home-grown. Even if they have 1000 potted plants, they are still potted plants, and they are still $100 tomatoes. EC2 is a 5000-acre California tomato grower where the fields have been leveled using lasers and the fruits are harvested by robots driving themselves using on-board GPUs. Their tomatoes cost 5¢. An Oxide computer is like having a 1-acre kitchen garden where the tomatoes are in rows. These are more like $1 each. The economics are undoubtedly better.