4 ms·

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.
  - cyanydeez 4y ago
    So, all they care about is the maximum cash flow,not the number of users or even clients. It should take few brain cells to understand business is driven by return on investment and not "most burgers served"
BozeWolf 4y ago
Point is that akamai does not want people as clients. Akamai wants big corporations as clients.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  Then why by Linode, who's entire business model is small business and hobbiests?
  - jimbo9991 4y ago
    Because big corporations buy the exact same things, you just market to them differently. Throw in various kinds of support contracts and "enterprise" whatever and you make much better margins off of the corporate contract even if what you are selling is pretty much identical. The point is that Akamai is probably correct that all Linode really needs to change to be seen as viable by large corporations is the marketing. Its incredibly dumb that the world works like that even at the scale of large corporations that you would think would care less about being marketed to, but my experience has been the opposite / being tickled by marketing is even more important for big corporations. It should also be noted that the people who choose infrastructure vendors are rarely the actual sysadmins in charge of the infrastructure. These kinds of decisions are standardized across large organizations (sysadmins would never be able to agree on something like that let's be honest) and the choices tend to be made by people who haven't set up a new server in a decade, (if they've ever done so then they are more technical than most in charge of IT purchasing).

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.
- cyanydeez 4y ago
  So, all they care about is the maximum cash flow,not the number of users or even clients. It should take few brain cells to understand business is driven by return on investment and not "most burgers served"

BozeWolf 4y ago

Point is that akamai does not want people as clients. Akamai wants big corporations as clients.

phpisthebest 4y ago
Then why by Linode, who's entire business model is small business and hobbiests?
- jimbo9991 4y ago
  Because big corporations buy the exact same things, you just market to them differently. Throw in various kinds of support contracts and "enterprise" whatever and you make much better margins off of the corporate contract even if what you are selling is pretty much identical. The point is that Akamai is probably correct that all Linode really needs to change to be seen as viable by large corporations is the marketing. Its incredibly dumb that the world works like that even at the scale of large corporations that you would think would care less about being marketed to, but my experience has been the opposite / being tickled by marketing is even more important for big corporations. It should also be noted that the people who choose infrastructure vendors are rarely the actual sysadmins in charge of the infrastructure. These kinds of decisions are standardized across large organizations (sysadmins would never be able to agree on something like that let's be honest) and the choices tend to be made by people who haven't set up a new server in a decade, (if they've ever done so then they are more technical than most in charge of IT purchasing).