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Jonathon: So we started working on this as something outside of Rackspace and then we
talked with Pat Condon who was one of the founders of Rackspace. And, we actually worked
with Pat basically since both of us had started at Rackspace. We sat in his office and so,
he kind of knew what we were doing and he said, "You guys should bring this in and
do this here and uh...and you know, then you'll have our data centers and our kind of um...support
and expertise on this front." And we knew that that was uh...that was what would definitely
be an advantage in trying to build this out because obviously it would be about scale
and about um...high quality infrastructure and the network is really going to matter.
And so, um...so it it made a lot of sense and uh...you know I think I think that one of the
things that has kept Rackspace continuing to move forward is we uh...we don't get too
defensive about what our current products are, what our current you know, what we do
right now. We are willing to look past that and say you know, "okay well, you know this
is what we do right now, we are going to do it really well, but what's coming down the
road that are customers are going to want? And even if it's somewhat competitive you
know, we still want to make sure that that were going to be we are going to be a viable
option in there." And at the time you know, if you if you looked at what what uh...the
selling points were for Rackspace it was you're on a dedicated machine, you're on your own
infrastructure; you're not sharing it with anybody. Um...you know, it was a lot around
don't share anything, premium service, high price point, and then we came in and we were
we were like "well, here's an offering that does involve shared resources and is a much
lower price point." And, I I think you know, they were definitely, um...at the time parts
of the company were kind of like "what? What are we doing?" But, um...I think...
Todd: Some of our first advertising was pretty much just trashing on owning a server, which
is what a Rackspace customer meant essentially. Jonathon: Yea and what's great though the
uh...the um...the author of our 'cause we call it the Hosting System and the original tagline
which Graham came up with was, "The System Beats the Server". So, we were going directly
after uh...after you know people that were just buying a server. And uh...and and so I
think the thing that uh...that you know the the leadership and eventually the entire company
came to see is that that this is where the industry is going and we you know we are going
to get cannibalize by these kinds of products. Do we want to do it to ourselves or just let
other companies come in and do it?