As a new customer, I feel like Joyent needs to focus on simplifying things quite a bit. I want to run NodeJS on a server. I install the aptly titled 'SmartMachine Node.js' product and expect it to be the right version and the basic tools installed to get the job done. Instead, I get this morass of oh, you didn't install the right machine or oh, node is in some other directory now. Can you see how that might be distracting?

Sure, I didn't spend a lot of time with it, why should I? I saw that it was missing a great deal of basic things out of the box. I decided quickly to not waste my time learning more esoteric stuff that is only useful if I stick with Joyent and SmartOS.

You are an absolute genius for creating dtrace and it is nice to have but certainly isn't a necessity for most applications. Your example is voxer which is a total edge case since they've been pushing the node envelope since day one.

In the end, the reality is that SmartOS doesn't feel modern at all, it feels like Windows98. Actually, it feels like SunOS back when I had pizza boxes under my desk 15 years ago. I could spend time giving you tons of (free) feedback about what's wrong with SmartOS or I could just use Ubuntu and move on.

9900+ concurrent connections on a $22/mo Ubuntu box is 'good enough' for me.