Thread

Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

643 points · 315 comments · speckx

thehamkercat · 1785939135 · focus · HN ↗
Why are companies slapping "OS" in their product naming? it's stupid
1. sixdimensional · 1786024295 · focus · HN ↗
  You're missing the subtle marketecture trick here they are doing..
  Non-technical people don't always think of an OS as the computer OS. To them, sometimes it means more like standard operating procedure or process - a standard way of doing things.
  Secondly, for tech products, calling yourself an OS, you are associating yourself with things like Windows, Mac or Linux. You are indirectly trying to grandstand and position yourself as meaningful enough to be an "OS" when clearly, that is far from what an app layer + AI/LLM on top of a real OS is.
  The biggest giveaway is this, and I'm exposing it right here -from a technical perspective, what operating system computer technology was built from scratch from first principles around AI/LLM?
  Someone wants to be the first company to get huge sums of money/funding to be that startup/project, so that is also a positioning tactic.
  The issue is of course, most people are standing on the shoulders of giants at this point... and OS has this conflicted meaning with nontechnical users also about work process vs the software that runs my computer.
  1. kentonv · 1786031871 · focus · HN ↗
    You are reading WAY too much into it.
    We aren't that clever about naming at Cloudflare.
    Do you know how we named Wrangler, our local dev tool for Workers?
    Literally, the person that created it said: "I named this Wrangler because I wanted to give it a name so dumb that we definitely won't release it under that name and will come up with something better."
    We didn't come up with something better later.
    Honestly Cloudflare OS is kinda same thing. We brainstormed names last week trying to come up with something better but nobody could agree on anything so it just went out as Cloudflare OS, which is what we'd been calling it internally for no particularly good reason.
    sixdimensional · 1786034095 · focus · HN ↗
    Ah, my friend, I'm talking about the broader trend of people adding "OS" to the end of everything, not just Cloudflare. My apologies, I was not singling out Cloudflare here, but I see why you thought that! Cloudflare is very "on trend" I would say by using "OS", however.
    FWIW, I am a sociotechnical specialist so I watch these things carefully.
    Actually, I think Cloudflare OS quite possibly a good name for this case - especially with some of the history of coming from Sandstorm and what Sandstorm was trying to do for users. I super appreciate the background you shared about what you were doing here (and the secret master plan), and it makes complete sense to me actually.
    I am also very sure of what I am saying about so many other things popping up with the "OS" tagged on - from both technical and non-technical use cases/companies.
    I also appreciate your honesty about cleverness - LOL.. two hard things right? :)
    Just as one example though of the larger trend I am watching, look at the launches on ProductHunt that have OS in the name (some are old, of course, but even in the last few weeks I've seen about 5 new things in this vein) [1].
    I think this is a case of the hive mind actually coalescing around an idea (and even I was having the same idea), and I am not sure yet what the result will be, but my strong suspicion is some sort of new real operating system (potentially built with current OS foundations) that is built from AI-first principles, and a lot of other people trying to make it seem like their app is an "OS", either because they are using a nontechnical definition (or trying to piggyback on a technical one).
    [1] <a href="https://www.producthunt.com/search/launches?q=OS" rel="nofollow">https://www.producthunt.com/search/launches?q=OS

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