RE: [Harvard Biz Review] An Interview with Akamai's CEO.

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From: Mark Day (markday@cisco.com)
Date: Wed Jun 21 2000 - 12:06:14 PDT


> On Wed, 21 Jun 2000, Adam Rifkin -4K wrote:
>
> > ...so I ordered it. Purchasing a single copy as a hard copy or
> > electronic download costs me the same amount: $5.50. Even in 2000
> > people are willing to pay that much for a single article that
> > interests them.
> >
> > > Akamai Technologies is attracting investors, employees, partners, and
>
> Hmmm...
>
> You paid for an article,
> about a company that convinced everyone,
> that a free and trivial web proxy-cache is bad.
> But paying them to do the same,
> only _exponentially_ less efficiently,
> is good...

I think the Conrades interview is pretty lame but I don't think you should
get carried away with the idea that Akamai is worthless. We (SightPath, now
Cisco) had a paper in the Lisbon workshop on web caching where we measured
Akamai and Digital Island's performance. The data showed pretty clearly that
both systems were doing a better than random choice among the available
servers, and in some locations were doing almost as well as they could.

I'm not crazy about Akamai -- I think they oversell themselves horribly --
but it's not junk.

--Mark


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