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.