Cloudflare needs to innovate more in order to properly be in a position to do long-term battle with Google and AWS.
Their overhead cost is a concern. As a free service provider to many sites that use them for encryption, they're possibly primarily benefiting (CDN-Wise) from Google's encryption assertions made in Chrome.
A few well-publicized system outages for CloudFlare right now would devastate their entire business model... It's happened.
In order to be independently competitive truly, Cloud Flare would need to probably quickly develop a new mobile phone OS, web browser, and scale their cloud hosting to market prominence very quickly in order to be able to preserve their current market share over the long term, which is a very very steep mountain to climb right now.
It's a very steep mountain to climb, because Google already has the aforementioned things in place, and AWS is firmly embedded with customers that don't want to face huge costs in refactoring apps.
CloudFlare needs to battle Google on many fronts to gain a proper foothold. If I was in leadership, I'd recommend a partnership with a struggling mobile phone company like RIM or Nokia, and possibly with Mozilla on the browser front. Reassuring users about and being committed to upholding personal privacy would be another solid move, and then getting rid of the "utility metered" approach to charging for cloud hosting and introducing simple monthly and annual rates with easier services would likely be ideal moves to ensuring proper growth and market share into the future.
This is the chess game that wins from my perspective... As companies like AWS and Azure develop more and more micro-service and licensing-locked cloud platform apps, it becomes harder and much more costly for those same customers to migrate anywhere else like CloudFlare. This is also why competing with giants is a dangerous game. CloudFlare would need to put a lot on the line to compete.
The smartest hosting customers often stay liquid in terms of which platform they can leverage and migrate to through chess in development, but the process of getting locked into one host platform is now a very real threat. Overall success has always been a chess game to me. Informed and carefully planned strategy, and conservation of resources, always works best.
Their overhead cost is a concern. As a free service provider to many sites that use them for encryption, they're possibly primarily benefiting (CDN-Wise) from Google's encryption assertions made in Chrome.
A few well-publicized system outages for CloudFlare right now would devastate their entire business model... It's happened.
In order to be independently competitive truly, Cloud Flare would need to probably quickly develop a new mobile phone OS, web browser, and scale their cloud hosting to market prominence very quickly in order to be able to preserve their current market share over the long term, which is a very very steep mountain to climb right now.
It's a very steep mountain to climb, because Google already has the aforementioned things in place, and AWS is firmly embedded with customers that don't want to face huge costs in refactoring apps.
CloudFlare needs to battle Google on many fronts to gain a proper foothold. If I was in leadership, I'd recommend a partnership with a struggling mobile phone company like RIM or Nokia, and possibly with Mozilla on the browser front. Reassuring users about and being committed to upholding personal privacy would be another solid move, and then getting rid of the "utility metered" approach to charging for cloud hosting and introducing simple monthly and annual rates with easier services would likely be ideal moves to ensuring proper growth and market share into the future.
This is the chess game that wins from my perspective... As companies like AWS and Azure develop more and more micro-service and licensing-locked cloud platform apps, it becomes harder and much more costly for those same customers to migrate anywhere else like CloudFlare. This is also why competing with giants is a dangerous game. CloudFlare would need to put a lot on the line to compete.
The smartest hosting customers often stay liquid in terms of which platform they can leverage and migrate to through chess in development, but the process of getting locked into one host platform is now a very real threat. Overall success has always been a chess game to me. Informed and carefully planned strategy, and conservation of resources, always works best.