> We did our own host hypervisor, assuring an integrated and seamless user experience — and eliminating the need for a third-party hypervisor and its concomitant rapacious software licensing.

In exchange for your own hardware purchase cost, in practical terms also a license.

> We did our own integrated storage service, allowing the rack-scale system to have reliable, available, durable, elastic instance storage without necessitating a dependency on a third party.

In exchange for an unbreakable dependency on the first-party solution.

I'm being overly aggressive because I do lurve your product and the Sun/Apple way of vertical integration is especially valuable for security ... things break at the interfaces and since you have absolute control over that, you can be actually good. Then there's the improved UX that comes with an integrated product. The root of trust work you've done is especially noteworthy, in a sea of also especially noteworthy efforts across the entire vertical product.

But I'm leery that with the absolute lock-in, and VC pressure, you might succumb to squeezing your customers a la AVGO.