Loudcloud ditches hosting, changes name, will sell software.

SFGate: "Weighed down by big losses, Loudcloud has agreed to sell its core Web hosting business to computer giant Electronic Data Systems for $63.5 million and will refocus on selling software....'When you start a company, you start out with a theory about how the market is going to work,' said Andreessen, the company's chairman. 'Sometimes you get it really lucky, and you get it right like Netscape. Sometimes the market wants something else.'" Bummer. This, of course, is why companies like LoudCloud, and so many during the end of the boom era, which start out with gazillions of dollars from the get-go, to bet on their "theory"—and, thus, reducing their agility to change to what the market turns out to really want—are stacking the odds against themselves. Granted, LoudCloud needed a bit more than, say, a software startup due to the business they were in, but the general (and crucial to just about all development of anything good) principal of building incrementally just did not seem to be within the realm of imagination.