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Comment by godzillabrennus | Hacker News Reader

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"Akamai Connected Cloud" is practically peak corporate brand. The only thing it's missing is "Powered by Akamai"

The co-founder's fate doesn't exactly change Akamai's brand in my opinion, either. They've built themselves up as the Enterprise CDN which is the exact antithesis to the brand Linode cultivated.

I'll literally forget how to get there and login with a name like that.

I just hope you turned those servers off.

But it’s fun to say. Makes me feel like a samurai

The experience with them is very enterprisey and a few years ago very manual. When CloudFlare went all in on API management, Akamai required changing many things in the web panel. Their official terraform module only started in 2020!

Their preferred onboarding is still extremely "talk to an expert" and "contact sales". I can't find a pricing page for their CDN.

I'm not criticising their tech itself, but as far as brands go, they present as the extremely bland B2B, stay away if you're not a corp. (Also, they do airport adverts...)

This is exactly what I meant by a bland corporate brand. Their tech stack might be great, but their entire look and feel is "old school corporate you need to talk to sales and if you need to ask how much you can't afford it" vs Linode's "developer first, here's all the info you need go ahead and sign up" approach.

Oh and the salesperson is going to look up your company info before deciding if they'll even call you back to give you a quote.

Are you my colleague? I don't understand why part of our teams chose Akamai. The other ones who use Cloudflare just do API calls when they deploy.

The Akamai team needs to send an email, then 2 meetings going back and forth, staging, approval, and then go-live.

Because Akamai still has better performance and price point than cloudflare.

The fact that the founders named the company based off a Hawaiian-English dictionary look-up strikes me as pretty bland-corporate, "The company was named after akamai, which means 'clever,' or more colloquially, 'cool' in Hawaiian, which Lewin had discovered in a Hawaiian-English dictionary after the suggestion of a colleague." [0]

From what I've seen living here and hearing Hawaiian Creole English (aka pidgin), nobody uses akamai to refer to something that is cool... Always used in the smart/clever context. But then again, I wouldn't expect the founders to know that if they didn't have knowledge of local Hawaii culture.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akamai_Technologies#History

Look up Aegis and see how many companies use the Greek word for shield. Sometimes a name is the last thing you actually want to be dealing with when starting a company.

He wasn't just killed, he was the first and possibly only person on AA11 to try and fight them off. Man went down swinging.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lewin

That was 22 years ago.

Plenty of time to establish a bland corporate brand, Google seems to be doing it just fine.

Wow, I didn't realize that was him. He was on Flight 11 (struck North Tower) and his throat was cut. It's thought that he may have been trying to interfere with the initial disturbance as he had a combat background with the IDF.

Not just killed in the 9-11 attacks. But a brave, courageous person who stood up against the terrorists on the flight.

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