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Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

If Cloudflare is able to do this now, why wasn't Akamai able to do exactly the same thing when AWS was still a baby? Serious question. Was it lack of vision? Poor execution? Technology or market just not ready yet? Without such an answer, we might have to consider the possibility that Cloudflare isn't any more able to do this than Akamai was.

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I think that the key here is Cloudflare's approach: mainly working in the open - Akamai works kind of "behind the scenes", I don't think that developer working mainly for SMB is even able to try to evaluate their services, besides - just look at their website, it screams "big corps, talk to representative to learn about pricing"

I think that big disadvantage in this approach is that they are not getting "mindshare", in contrast to that people are able to use Cloudflare serivces even for themselves and as they grow professionally CF's constantly increasing amount of solutions is there as something familiar, approachable and ready to use.

When AWS was a baby charging around $0.10/GB for egress I had a quote sitting on my desk from Akamai wanting $1.50/GB for a minimum of 1TB per month.

They were (are?) even more addicted to their egress charges.

And midgress! Don't forget midgress.

Sounds like a neat name for fly.io managed pub-sub (jbor notwithstanding)...

It’s important to understand that Akamai has always been an enterprise company. They are not developer friendly, and target the 1000 largest websites on earth. They were never going to compete with a ground-up cloud offering.

As an ex-AWS employee (although not an exec, but I think most Amazon execs would agree), I see a lot of parallels: Cloudflare is run the exact same way as Amazon is. They believe in Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation and hence continue to disrupt themselves.

All of the above.

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