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Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

vercel.com

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Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#81

Post by zoul »

baxuz wrote: post #68
sholladay wrote: post #50

I gave up on Zeit when Now v2 came out because, besides it being more complex and a pain to migrate to, they went back on their promises about no vendor lock-in. Up until late 2018, their site had a very different philosophy that they abruptly abandoned. [1] [2] Fool me once... 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n...

I honestly don't understand this fetishization of "serverless" functions. It leads to so much vendor lock-in, tooling complexity, and straight-up lack of features.

For me as a noob with very simple requirements, it’s very refreshing not having to care where and how my server code runs. Just add to a repo, push and forget. And if my code is written against some simple HTTP request interface, there shouldn’t be much trouble to move it elsewhere.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#82

Post by sholladay »

DagAgren wrote: post #62
sholladay wrote: post #50

I gave up on Zeit when Now v2 came out because, besides it being more complex and a pain to migrate to, they went back on their promises about no vendor lock-in. Up until late 2018, their site had a very different philosophy that they abruptly abandoned. [1] [2] Fool me once... 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20181107092845/https://zeit.co/n...

Same here. Migration path to Heroku was easier than migration path to Zeit v2, and Heroku hasn't fucked me over by forcing me to migrate to an entirely new model yet.

I also went to Heroku. Icing on the cake was when I discovered that even on Heroku's free plan, we were getting significantly better performance than on Zeit's paid plan. Response times were more stable and had far less latency. Made me really happy and almost made it worth the frustration of having to migrate in the first place. Almost. Heroku has definitely improved over the years.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#83

Post by kugelblitz »

adriand wrote: post #45

As someone who has been involved in many branding projects, it is amusing to see all the negative commentary on the rebrand. This is human nature 101. Everyone always hates rebrands. In fact I am willing to bet that the executives who eventually bought into this new name also hated the new name when they heard it. Whenever we presented a new name to a company that wanted to be rebranded, we always asked them not to p…

Yeah, a rebranding will always sound weird at first. The question is whether the upside is better in the long-term - time will tell. Vercel does sound good (though does sound close to parcel for me and also reads like vermicelli a bit).

For "Zeit" I am biased, since I speak German and it translates to "time" (and there's a large circulation newspaper called "Zeit"... well, actually "Die Zeit" which reads funny in English - but actually fits for this rebranding :-) ).

When "Open BC" (Germany's LinkedIn, BC stands for Business Club) renamed itself to "Xing" 14 years ago, it felt really weird to me. Though I think by now most people on the Xing platform won't even remember the old name. And in 5 years time, people who weren't even born when it was rebranded will start joining the platform.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#84

Post by neutronicus »

mikro2nd wrote: post #63
tango12 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: Not sure why, but from the article: > Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel.

Self-delusional marketingspeak. To me 'Vercel' sounds like a brand of cheap batteries.

And to me it sounds like a plasma-physics simulation package running on supercomputers.

\shrug\

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#85

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

ghaff wrote: post #80
austhrow743 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To run from a bad reputation To expand in to a market that already has a well known company by that name Hard to rank for it for search purposes Brand is about a specific niche that you want to expand out of

There are various types of rebranding that may or may not involve renaming. However, with respect to renaming specifically, it often also comes about because your company name now bears no relationship to what you actually do. To take a random example from a past life, NL Industries used to be the Nation Lead Company but, while they still have some involvement in pigments, they don't actually do anything related to l…

After the renaming you mentioned of NL, was there any lasting measurable business effect such as change in turnover, profit, new customers, anything at all?

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#86

Post by Nextgrid »

DagAgren wrote: post #60
tango12 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: Not sure why, but from the article: > Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel.

I connected it to none of those words. Instead, I connected it to a) some kind of telephone company that is dodgy b) incels.

Vercel sounds like something about vermin and incels.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#87

Post by mattmaroon »

adriand wrote: post #45

As someone who has been involved in many branding projects, it is amusing to see all the negative commentary on the rebrand. This is human nature 101. Everyone always hates rebrands. In fact I am willing to bet that the executives who eventually bought into this new name also hated the new name when they heard it. Whenever we presented a new name to a company that wanted to be rebranded, we always asked them not to p…

For what little it’s worth, I’d never heard either name before and I think they are both terrible.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#89

Post by SnowingXIV »

I might be missing something. How does this compare with netlify which I've been using sometime as my 'heroku' for static sites? With that I'm also getting the ability to post-process things, use lambda functions, even get get forms for free (up to a point) which is needed for almost every site. It also provides slick DNS. Has worked wonders with gulp/jekyll/etc builds. This does seem to do all of that with the exception of forms.

If this is just another choice that's good. Perhaps it's faster? I've deployed using zeit and it is a really smooth process but not much different than netlify's build that works with a git push. Either way, congrats on the funding!

Disclaimer: I don't work for netlify, though I did interview with them awhile back.

Re: Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

#90

Post by daniel_levine »

kalev wrote: post #16

Might the name change come from one of lead investors named 'Accel', who wanted to align the name of zeit more with their own brand? Vercel/Accel? I honestly don't understand why you would do that though, as you just threw one of the most well known brand names in JS ecosystem out of the window.

Doesn’t come from us
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