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

641 points · 315 comments · speckx

  1. thehamkercat · · focus · HN ↗
    Why are companies slapping "OS" in their product naming? it's stupid
    1. sixdimensional · · 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 · · 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.

        1. sixdimensional · · focus · HN ↗
          P.S. And maybe not clever about naming at Cloudflare, but I'd say with high certainty, quite clever about technology!

          Thank you for taking the time to respond to my comment, I appreciate all you do!

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