On the death of EMC...

"It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes."
Dorothy Parker

The acquisition of EMC by Dell is a tragedy for Boston and the storage industry whose impact on the start-up world will be felt globally.

You need to read Antonio Rodriguez's take on it called Garbage trucks and the death of EMC to get a truly pessimistic view.

Or something a bit more practical, Changes in the IT Industry, from the always spot-on Chuck Hollis. In this light, Chuck's moves from EMC to VMware to Oracle seem logical response to the external stimulus of commoditization.

I am mourning the death of a respected competitor and a true industry leader. EMC's unique culture of arrogance and ruthless determination impacted everyone they could touch, which was many of us and global. EMC does not believe in luck or the mythical 'better product'. They earned every dollar and percentage of market share.

Demanding, but also willing to work just as hard alongside you, is the EMC culture. When I was running operations in dot-com land, they worked me, my board, my partners and even my competitors to surround my little project with EMC. In subsequent years, they acquired well and used their salesforce as a cudgel to introduce technology to companies. Every start-up I've worked with would be pleased - and a little intimidated - to have EMC buy you.

Companies, technology and even people I know have gone to Dell and disappeared. I hope EMC isn't one of them.

"The report of my death was an exaggeration"
Mark Twain

$694M of Respect: Dot Hill & Seagate

The Rodney Dangerfield of storage, Dot Hill, earned the acquisition premium from Seagate. 
Dot Hill never got to be big enough, smart enough, clever enough to be their own brand, but they pushed on as the primary provider of good-enough, clever-enough, robust-enough storage behind many other brands. They never got respect, but a lot of people knew them and liked them.

Dot Hill never created a storage brand for themselves because they didn't have the proprietary software team(s) required to deliver storage for the previous decade. They were pushing the boundary of enterprise storage with new de-dupe, compression, DR technology. They didn't invent new protocols and clustered scale-out systems. They stuck to what they did well, which was a really solid disk array. It wasn't sexy and that's OK.

Times have changed. That software that EMC, NetApp and others locked so tightly into their boxes is breaking free. Software-Defined-Storage of all sorts has cracked the box and all that magic software is now available to run on x86 servers with 'good-enough' storage arrays as the target. Even worse, SDS allows mixing heterogenous storage into single pools that are transparent to the user.

STORAGE HARDWARE IS FUNGIBLE!! 
And, that is what defines a mature, commoditized market.  Seagate has been in that business for years. They know how to extract value from incremental innovations and profit from supply chains.

Dot Hill outlasted, not outwitted. For the next battle, they needed to get bigger. Seagate is bigger.

My reading list:
Joe Landman's few words...
http://scalability.org/2015/08/ma-seagate-snarfs-up-dothill/

El Reg's Take
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/19/seagate_scoops_dot_hill_for_us694_million/

Some Writing

When I first joined my company, I did a few videos and a couple of internal writing projects. Then, I got pulled into some very complex market and product analysis projects that ate up every free moment I had.

I'm entering a new phase to propose a new product roadmap, including another new product launch. The time pressure is different, so I've been asked to write a few pieces again.

Here's the latest published on Solutions Review

Worried About Security in Cloud Backup & Disaster Recovery?

It uses Bruce Schneier's quote from several years ago "Security is both a feeling and a reality." 

I'll have to fit his Security Theater material into another one. 

Coffee, Music, Wifi… Work!

 Saturday mornings I drop my daughter off for her job feeding horses and I head to the local Panera to crank through a few hours of writing.

And, what do I do first?

Coffee! Because no matter how often I do this, I am still not a morning person. 

Music! Because coffee isn’t enough to get the neurons firing. This morning it’s Husker Du

 

Wifi!  Because… Well, really I have no real reason for needing Wifi.

Everything I should be working on is already on this laptop: Notes, Files, & Applications.  Everything but the human connection. What is missing is the ritual of checking social media, the latest news, and affirming my place in the herd.

Morning ritual complete, now on to work. 

CLI is to Desktop as Desktop is to Mobile

Reliable Internet Troubleshooting Agent c. 1998

Command line interfaces are great for managing systems. The reason Sys Admins love command line interfaces is because they are simple, scriptable and accessible. Thanks to SSH, they did not have to be tied to a single machine - ever.

CLIs are mediocre for managing Data Centers.   A good UX that provides information on many systems visually is an selling point for even the most jaded of BOFHs. You'd never use your system CLI as the starting point in developing the Desktop app, would you?

Then why do you think a responsive browser interface is enough for mobile?  

A responsive web page is a proof of concept, not a design. Some things I've noticed lately.

1. Use Case details matter. Your user is mobile for a reason. The experience of checking an alert over a pint is not the same as standing next to the CEO explaining why file & sync isn't working.    
2. The experience changes when I rotator type. The available space is different.
3. Hands are different. Zoom, swipe, & drag can be better than point & click.    
4. Bandwidth! I want to use as little as possible to get what I need done. 
5. Security. Most of the devices are BYOD. Build in the safeguards from day one. 

Break out of the box. Your customers already are. 

I'm certain there is a better set of rules out there... Comments & Pointers welcome! 

Easy to Write = Most Popular

Foo's Paradox: 

The blog post that took the least time gets the most attention. [1]

Words are not precious. 

 I am willing to bet that the average reading speed has increased - certainly the pace of creation has.
Save the angst over a well crafted sentence for your first novel.

Making a connection matters. 

Having a point of view is most important. We still crave human connection. This is a cocktail party. Loosen up and say something that gets that girl (or guy) talking to you. Wouldn't you rather be known as the interesting one?

This does not go on your Permanent Record. 

These words may exist forever on a hard drive, but I'm writing for right now, not for humanity. The Internet is a great trash heap and there are no grades.


Stop worrying  and get writing...

[1] : I saw this quote on Twitter, but don't know to whom to attribute it. 

TL;DR

Passing the Scan Test 

With dozens of different presentations, web pages and white papers for different companies in the last few months, I always use the Scan Test.

What did I see First? 

• Where did my eye go?
• What was communicated there?
• Did it actually say anything? 

And, why did I put a picture, change fonts, italics or underline it? 

Did I use a picture to draw the eye down the page....

To where we really communicate what is different and important about this particular product to this particular person and create an emotional attachment or intellectual resonance with the viewer?

Or should we have just used a graphic and accepted that few people read?





On the other hand, I focus on B2B Technology Marketing. Most of my customers actually care about their technology, their job, and their reputation. The people I want to reach are highly-connected information junkies. They read a lot, write often, and value their time.

To reach them, we must provide the in-depth explanation of what, how, and why of the product, the use case and the architecture behind it to be credible. The presentation must be concise with the ability to drill further in the areas where the reader is curious.

 So I write and I edit and a make certain that when you scan, you get something valuable.

Never a Wall of Text...