Linode isn't used by Akamai customers and won't be.
It would be a much bigger hurdle for Linode to become enterprise-friendly than for Akamai to become developer-friendly.
Akamai is "call for pricing" because they never evolved from an enterprise product. And no "enterprise" just buys off the shelf. They negotiate with a long budget, vendor risk management, legal, etc. process. Its unlikely that many of their contracts are even the same verbiage.
But we can all think of 100s of companies that did not do this and either died or are hollow shells of their former selves.
Cloudflare et al are commoditizing their gig. As more new blood goes into enterprises, they’ll want to use what they’re already familiar with vs the big enterprise thing they’ve never touched and find awkward.
I don’t know that a) I’m right or b) that they’ll be successful.
But Enterprising Linode would be folly. Even late entrants like Oracle Cloud are struggling due to lack of support from Enterprise cloud products. Changing them to support all the annoying acronym requirements of an Enterprise is a many year journey. AWS and Azure really only did that to support their huge government contracts.
I think the only other viable theory is for them to try and keep Linode as Linode as just a diversification play.
That would be odd, to me at least, because they’re buying an offering that seems to be slowly dying anyway. It really never left the hobbyist/tiny shop market, and even there, AWS/Azure is eating into them. I do have a soft spot for them as they’re a much more “human” company.
It would be a much bigger hurdle for Linode to become enterprise-friendly than for Akamai to become developer-friendly.
Akamai is "call for pricing" because they never evolved from an enterprise product. And no "enterprise" just buys off the shelf. They negotiate with a long budget, vendor risk management, legal, etc. process. Its unlikely that many of their contracts are even the same verbiage.