Thread

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

641 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. fl4regun · 1786027317 · focus · HN ↗
    >you are associating yourself with things like Windows, Mac or Linux
    But this is nothing like those things.
    sixdimensional · 1786034785 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes - I agree - that is what I am trying to say in fact. But the association gets made because of the naming.
    The only dictionary definition of "operating system" I see is like the technical one on Wikipedia [1], which IS more like Windows, Mac or Linux.. not like an app or platform.
    From my concise Oxford English Dictionary, for example.. "operating system, n. the low-level software that supports a computer's basic functions".
    Like, would it be better if it was just called the "Cloudflare App"? Or the "Cloudflare App Platform"? or the "Cloudflare Platform App"?
    Those aren't clear winners either, they could easily be confused for product offerings or other things.
    They could name it, like, "Cloudflare Rocket" (random product name) or "Cloudflare Jane" (e.g. personality) and then say, "this is the desktop app for Cloudflare Jane, which is a platform where we put all these tools and capabilities that combine with agentic powers".. but then it wouldn't have the marketing flair either.
    [1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system

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