[a5seo]

I used Rackspace back in 2001-2002. Made the switch after hosting my JSP web app on servlets.net and experiencing an extended outage with no support. The difference in support was nothing short of miraculous.

I’m inclined to think Apollo failed to understand the investments necessary to make such a business work, and figured they could squeeze costs out of the business without losing value. Funny how these finance types always seem to find themselves suffering from “Black Swan” events every few years.

[Nifty3929]

Actually I think the financial types correctly identified that Rackspace's days of growth were over, and what remained is to allow it to wind down over a couple of decades, getting what profit they could along the way. There's no point investing in something who's days are numbered, so they didn't. They cut costs and jacked up the bottom line. They probably didn't want or plan for anything major like losing emails, but they probably did anticipate a degradation in quality of service and gradual customer attrition.

I'm not sure this is good or bad necessarily - it's just part of a business cycle.

It should be a wake-up call for folks that continuing to do business with a company that is no longer interested in growing and increasing top-line is risky. Companies trying to grow top-line will be very interested in over-delivering and keeping customers happy even if they lose on short-term bottom-line. The opposite is also true.