Re:No New Categories
by gk1 on Sunday August 16, 2020 @01:52PM
(#24179709)
Good observation -- you're the second person to point this out to me. (The first person said "It's basically Akamai with better DX.") That column refers to what they market, not necessarily what others think of them. Although we just think of them as a CDN, they are trying to market themselves in a new category. The dissonance shows why creating a new category takes more than just persistent marketing.
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As you wrote in your article, the new category becomes "another thing that needs explaining", and Fastly doesn't explain it well.
I guess what's happening is that these companies spend a lot of time internally discussing and refining their product and their marketing, and then one day someone comes up with a term for that, and everyone agrees that that is a great way to express all that. But nobody outside the company knows what all that is, because they don't have the same background, so they're just like, what is an edge cloud?