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I'm sure they spent a lot of time thinking about this, but why not just call it something "Linode by Akamai" or "Akamai Linode"? Neither "Akamai’s cloud computi

• whalesalad 4y ago
  Akanode
  • tnzk 4y ago
    Linomai also sounds not too bad
• jeremyjh 4y ago
  Because they don't want to sell it to anyone who has ever heard of Linode. They are going to sell through their existing corporate sales contacts, as a new cloud compute offering by your pals at Akamai.
  • s09dfhks 4y ago
    This is the correct answer
  • pointlessone 4y ago
    Does it mean that people who use Linode for Linode should be preparing to move out?
    • apple4ever 4y ago
      I certainly would
    • geuis 4y ago
      This is what I've been worried about since the acquisition. I've been a loyal customer for over a decade and hosted jsonip.com there for 12 years. Now I seriously need to look for alternative hosting if/when the corpo overlords decide to start changing the offered products.
      • scandox 4y ago
        I do business with Akamai on the DNS side and actually find them to be really supportive and flexible.
      • dachryn 4y ago
        I've been with DigitalOcean for a very long time, their prices seem comparable to Linode, I always saw them marketed more or less the same. In fact, I don't even know why one would pick Linode over DigitalOcean or vice versa
        • herbst 4y ago
          Same with Vultr if anyone still looking for options. Their new AMD power line is really worth looking into.
          • hereforphone 4y ago
            Beware of Vultr. The product works fine but the customer service is horrible. I had three days of downtime and they got sick of me asking for updates, ignored me, and didn't tell me when the service came back up. I switched back to DO and I'm fine with that again.
            • herbst 4y ago
              The be fair I had something similar happen with DO before. If I want stellar support I don't go with a affordable mega coorperation.
        • gibolt 4y ago
          I tried both, and stuck with DO. Linode UI was superclunky when you needed to dive into it, but DO was great. Any search for how to X immediately returned great documentation.
    • thaumaturgy 4y ago
      The writing's been on the wall for a couple of years now and Akamai doesn't have a strong presence in smaller niches. I moved most of my stuff over to DigitalOcean a while back. The few remaining instances are now an urgent todo.
    • djbusby 4y ago
      I am! Heading over to OVH.
    • ubermonkey 4y ago
      It sure looks like it. I thought that the moment they got bought. Same thing happened with Slicehost. They got absorbed by the Rackspace borg, which ruined everything we found appealing at SH -- so we found Linode. I guess now I'm looking for the new Linode/Slicehost style provider. Sucks.
      • bioemerl 4y ago
        Is anything wrong with digital ocean? This name change has me wanting to jump ship as well.
        • baggachipz 4y ago
          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34803696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34803696
          • bioemerl 4y ago
            That doesn't bother me as a customer. If the company is laying people off it's probably also getting more efficient and therefore cheaper.
            • jayparth 4y ago
              Empirically, it doesn't really correlate
            • taskforcegemini 4y ago
              that money just goes somewhere else. I'd rather see it invested in technology/service than management, marketing etc
        • dventimi 4y ago
          Evidently DO is doing layoffs and their support may be suffering for it. So there's that.
        • spiffytech 4y ago
    • ShakataGaNai 4y ago
      The writing has been on the wall for a while. Linode was great and reliable for a time, but their pace of development of new features has slowed significantly. That's not a problem per se but as Akamai muscles in more and more, it's clear the "good ol' Linode" was dead. Not specific to this announcement today, but as of a few weeks ago I terminated my Linode account, which had been my primary and active hosting provider since Feb 2010.
      • JellyBeanThief 4y ago
        May I ask where you migrated to?
    • stephenr 4y ago
      A client of mine has used Linode for several years, increasing from 2 low end VMs when I first started with them, to the current 8 machines (well technically it's 13 right now but the 5 extras are because of their network migration breaking stuff and us needing to setup new VMs) Not completely because of, but definitely somewhat because of the buyout, my client has agreed they should diversify and we're going to adapt it from a fault-tolerant single location (i.e. right now there are no SPOFs for them except the DC itself going dark), to three independent locations, with less fault tolerance per DC, but greater overall resilience. One location will probably stay with Linode, but the other two definitely won't be Linode (they'll almost certainly each be a different vendor). The benefit for us is that adopting multiple (individually) lower-resilience locations means we can be less picky about the host for a given location, because we're not using as many "advanced" features at each location, due to the vastly reduced complexity at the individual DCs. Vultr and Digital Ocean *seem* like the obvious "Linode type services but not Linode" vendors, but neither seem to have a fantastic reputation from what I've seen. OVH and Hetzner seem like two alternatives that may be worth checking out more, but they both seem to have an almost-intentionally complex service offering list, and it's hard to tell if some fairly basic things are available with plain VPS services (e.g. private IP addresses).
  • crote 4y ago
    Why acquire Linonde when you are going to throw away everything which makes Linode valuable? Wouldn't it be cheaper to just create a cloud computing offering from scratch?
    • beagle3 4y ago
      In the long run, possibly. In the medium run (first 2-5 years) it’s not cheaper. In the short run? Buying Linode gave them a foothold in the market. Creating it from scratch, would have taken months (or even years) to be able to make the first offer, and years until they built a reputation that would attract customers.
      • chaosite 4y ago
        > a reputation that would attract customers. But the whole point is that they're throwing away any of Linode's existing reputation in favor of banking on the Akamai name.
        • ubermonkey 4y ago
          ....and probably not caring that for a significant chunk of folks, swapping small firm for HUGE firm is absolutely a downgrade.
        • beagle3 4y ago
          But they are starting with a customer base, some of which have been with Linode for over a decade. Way easier and faster to build reputation from that as a starting point. (And also already cash flow positive and profitable, ignoring the purchase=setup cost)
          • tchvil 4y ago
            Exactly, we are happy client for more than 14 years. And don't plan to move if they keep what Linode was good at. I mean when it is setup, except extremely rare migrations, you forget about it.
• fwlr 4y ago
  “Going forward, Akamai’s rent-a-server cloud services will be called Linode” would have been a better solution, yeah. So the way you say “Amazon EC2” or “Amazon AWS”, you’d say “Akamai Linode”. The only downside is that inevitably people would shorten that to “Linode” instead of “Akamai”, which hurts brand recognition. And I guess that downside is significant enough to cause them to go with this bland “Akamai’s cloud services” moniker. That’s what commenters here are reacting to more than anything, I think: it’s very “bland corporation”-y to care that much about brand recognition and that little about other things.
  • smaudet 4y ago
    Yeah except I don't want 'cloud services' I want a VPS, people who want a VPS are never going to look at Akamai branded that way.
    • RussianCow 4y ago
      And people who "just" want a VPS are probably not Akamai's target market, so I think they're fine with the tradeoff.
      • type0 4y ago
        Alienating existing customers is a terrible strategy
        • corobo 4y ago
          It's been working for them for 25 years so far. Akamai doesn't want you as a customer if you're not spending millions a year. It's not worth their time.
        • derefr 4y ago
          Existing customers of what? Akamai didn't buy a business (or if they did, they don't care that they did.) Akamai already has a business, one with (very profitable) customers. Rather, in buying Linode, Akamai bought another supply chain to use to feed their existing business-model with. Think like: a sporting goods company buying a tire company, not to make tires, but because they want to sell their existing customers rubber balls to go with their knee pads and stickball sticks; and the tire company happens to have a good rubber-goods supply chain that can be repurposed to do that. Akamai doesn't want to get into the VPS business. They want to repurpose Linode's systems to extend their "cloud-services integrated solution provider" solution portfolio. Remember "IBM SoftLayer"? Akamai wants to be IBM, and so they need a SoftLayer of their own.
• francislavoie 4y ago
  > They were running sponsorships using the Linode name on various media sites throughout last year, and I think even this year. As recently as 2 days ago (the day before this was announced): https://youtu.be/b-WFetQjifc?t=51s https://youtu.be/b-WFetQjifc?t=51s
  • dx034 4y ago
    Not unlikely the employees booking these ads weren't even aware of the rebranding at that time. Or weren't allowed to tell third parties and so pretended nothing would change.
  • fsckboy 4y ago
    There is always going to be a day they do it, and a next time when they don't. When it coincides with a press release, makes all the more sense.
• ulrikrasmussen 4y ago
  I don't know if it is just me, but I think that names of the form "X by Y" come across as particularly soulless and makes it look like X was just gobbled up by private equity and turned into a small department.
• onei 4y ago
  It's less about brand awareness and more about telling customers upfront what it does. If I'm an Akamai customer that's never heard of Linode, maybe I ignore "Akamai Linode" because I've no clue what it does. If I hear "Cloud Computing Services", I know exactly what that offering is likely to entail from the name alone - Compute as a service. The downside with this approach is that you lose any brand awareness of Linode. Perhaps that's not a terrible thing if their market share was minimal. You could have gone with "Akamai Linode Cloud Computing Services" or "Linode Cloud Computing Services by Akamai". But Linode seems a bit redundant in that name to my eyes.
  • fomine3 4y ago
    It's now called "Akamai Connected Cloud". I don't know what is "Connected Cloud". I'll guess that it's something like CRM for businesses or IoT BaaS.
    • kodisha 4y ago
      It could have been AkaLino, but chance wasted, sigh....
    • privacyking 4y ago
      The cloud is just someone else's computer. Connected cloud is just another marketing term.
      • fomine3 4y ago
        Disconnected Cloud is nonsense, so I suspect that "connected" covers besides cloud.
• znpy 4y ago
  I was surprised because less than a week ago I’ve seen a youtube video where “linode” was the sponsor. Wasted money I guess?
• EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Haha, you should see the names Red Hat comes up with. They offer a managed Apache Kafka. Which is called... ...Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka... Or RHOSAK for short. So terrible in all ways.
• traceroute66 4y ago
  > but why not just call it something "Linode by Akamai" or "Akamai Linode"? Because they know they're up against the AWS, GCP and Azure's of this world.... So it's probably a touch of the "nobody got fired for buying IBM", i.e. they consider "Akamai" to have more clout on a proposal sheet than "Linode". Of course nobody sensible reads anything into a brand name, but if you're trying to impress the customer's C-suite ....
  • robertlagrant 4y ago
    I'm surprised that many people would think the Akamai name has that much cache(t).
  • adql 4y ago
    I never saw any clout attached to Akamai of all things, it's just "that other big CDN"
    • jacooper 4y ago
      Isn't it actually the biggest? Cloudflare is popular because they have that crazy free tier, but Akamai has the biggest CDN network.
      • tomnipotent 4y ago
        Cloudflare revenues surpassed Akamai in 2022.
        • uncertainrhymes 4y ago
          What a strange thing to say. Cloudflare: Revenue: Total revenue of $975.2 million representing an increase of 49% year-over-year. GAAP net loss was $193.4 million compared to $260.3 million for fiscal 2021. GAAP net loss per basic and diluted share was $0.59, compared to $0.83 for fiscal 2021. Akamai: Revenue of $3.617 billion, up 4% year-over-year and up 8% when adjusted for foreign exchange. GAAP EPS of $3.26, down 17% year-over-year
• Hamuko 4y ago
  >Neither "Akamai’s cloud computing services" or "Akamai Connected Cloud" sound like viable names. Haven't we gotten pretty used to Amazon Web Services?
  • dotancohen 4y ago
    Not in the least. What we've gotten used to is "AWS". However "ACC" sounds more like a condition to avoid, rather than a service to use.
    • alpaca128 4y ago
      I think that only needs some time to get used to. ACC is less awkward to pronounce than AWS at least.
  • cfuendev 4y ago
    We hate AWS
• smcl 4y ago
  Hell even if they're determined to ditch the Linode brand, why make it "Akamai Connected Cloud", surely just "Akamai Cloud" is cleaner?
  • phpisthebest 4y ago
    The larger the company, the worse they are at naming things... Large company a name has a go through several committees in different depts, then to legal, then to some exec committee, and through all of that creative dies, slowly and painfully
• tsgagnon 4y ago
  I'm sure they spent a lot of time thinking about this, but why not just call it something "Linode by Akamai" or "Akamai Linode"? Neither "Akamai’s cloud computing services" or "Akamai Connected Cloud" sound like viable names. Is the goal just to get people to say "I use Akamai"? Maybe the same person works in the B2B space. There was the B2B platform Insite that was bought out by Episerver a few years ago (who bought Optimizely and then took on the name) and rebranded to Optimizely B2B Commerce Cloud by Insite, where they quickly lost "by Insite". Then in the last few months they've decided to rebrand the product again to Optimizely Configured Commerce to separate it from their other eCommerce platform which they are calling Optimizely Customized Commerce.
• mvkel 4y ago
  > Is the goal just to get people to say "I use Akamai"? Precisely.