Comment by crabmusket

Something that comes up frequently on their podcast - often in passing, I'm not sure I remember a specific episode to refer you to - is the woes of trying to support/debug commodity hardware. Think waiting for Dell to get back to your support ticket about a BIOS issue. Or being told "well you're the only person with this problem, so it must be your fault sorry!" This seems to come especially from Bryan's experience at Joyent. The way they describe "Oxide value" is being able to own as much of the stack as possible so that they can debug things down to the lowest level possible.