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Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Good Guys can be bad, sometime!

Anybody who served in armed forces and fought on behalf of country is a good guy in my books. So Hu Yoshida, you may be voted by me as worst corporate blogger but you are still a good guy.

My criticism was due to the impression your blog entries gave out - Recipe of typical industry white papers:

Half to two-third technology + Rest product = Technology White Paper by a Vendor

My feedback: Let your personality shine in your blog entries, and you have good one according to industry journalists! The blog is as much about you and what is in your head instead of just rowing HDS boat.

Reading Where should intelligence reside? reminded me of a SNIA conference call four years ago, where storage vendors were bickering about virtualization, host vs. storage vs. switch vs. appliance, in-band vs. out-of-band, file vs. block, blah ... blah ... blah.

In last three years, I talked to lot of companies (up and down the food chain) and I have the opinion that in general (exceptions rule sometime):

Sales focuses on what is coming down the pipeline next quarter

Marketing focuses on what is coming down the pipeline next year

Product management focuses on what is coming down the pipeline in two years

C-executive focuses on what may happen in three years and beyond.

So, Mr. Yoshida, I rather read your thoughts about how the Seagate-Maxtor merger changes the market dynamics of data storage industry and your visions of where the industry is heading. Let your marketing people chime on "Where virtualization should reside" and "VMware works better with HDS than EMC storage".

On the topic of Seagate-Maxtor merger, actually I would really like to read thoughts of NetApp's Dave Hitz as he is big fan of Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma and whether he sees it as continuation of established threatened by emerging in disk drive industry.

I am really looking to generate discussion on where storage virtualization should reside. Perhaps you can post your position. Comment by Hu Yoshida

Why would you want to re-hash an issue that has been beaten to death already and most probably better addressed by HDS marketing department by now?

I think anyone, who believes virtualization with in storage infrastructure resides at any one specific location only, should quit smoking whatever they are smoking. In my opinion, storage virtualization is just a cog in larger infrastructure wheel that supports "Information any where, any time, any way" aka Information Virtualization. Anything that resides between information and its users will be virtualized eventually.

He shines some light on aspects of the technology that us journalist types skipped in school. A message by Terry Sweeney, Byte & Switch in response to my blog entry .

Terry, they still don't teach this stuff in school. May be Hu Yoshida should consider encouraging other HDS folks to blog and address such issues and let him address larger picture.

I am familiar with your work and follow your blogs. Comment by Hu Yoshida

Hey, thanks for the comments and reading my blog ... I didn't know I have readers in upper echelon of the kingdom!

6 comments:

  1. So what's your take on the Seagate-Maxtor merger? Inquiring minds want to know...

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  2. "Hey, thanks for the comments and reading my blog ... I didn't know I have readers in upper echelon of the kingdom!"

    Anil, the data storage conversation in the blogosphere is still pretty small, although growing. It's very easy at this time to see who's talking about who and what.

    Now that you have a captive audience, I agree with the previous poster, tell us more about yourself and your stance.

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  3. My take on Seagate-Maxtor merger hopefully before the weekend.

    This blog is all about me, what I do and what I think. Thanks for your suggestion about expressing my stance on current data storage issues.

    Readers' feedback, agreement, disagreement, counter-arguments are always welcome. BTW, how about comments with names instead of anonymous?

    Anil

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  4. Anil,
    It seems sort of a waste to discuss the frivilous day to day mish mash of technology news, which always turns out to be a slow news day in my book. Some readers may be enlightened by reading the stories of your Christmas or the growth in predictions for 2006, but to me that seems worthless. Sure virtualization may have been beaten to death by SNIA along time ago, but customers haven't been able to see the theories behind the hype. It does prove positive for HDS but if I had a similar forum from EMC, IBM, or HP it would be easier for me to decipher what they are trying to do, rather than read something that was put out on the wire.

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  5. >> I am really looking to generate discussion on where storage virtualization should reside. Perhaps you can post your position. Comment by Hu Yoshida

    I was suprised to learn that the Hu Yoshida has a blog, more power to him. It's a personal blog isn't it :-) think it is unfair to ask a CEO to post information about his company in such a public space as a blog. It is Hu Yoshida's blog, not the CEO of HDS' blog. That's a powerful difference. It's easy for a sponsored and encouraged employee such as Scoble to post "insider" information and "controversial" topics. Microsoft experiment of promoting Scoble, the PR wolf in sheep's clothing, into the blogging world has been a great success and well done to Microsoft for seeing the marketing opportunities in blogs.

    However the comments of an employee and the comments of a CEO are aimed at different audiences. To me, the power of blogging is in spreading information and hopefully to "generate discussion", not having to fend off or ignore carefully worded questions aimed at revealing the inner workings/direction of a publicly listed company. As a business owner I would be delighted if my opposition regularly posted their opinions on my comnpany's faults and strengths to their blogs. Heck, I'd even pay them for that sort of feedback :-) But if you ask me about my opposition's strengths and weaknesses you will be met by silence.

    BTW If you want to see why some people should never have blogs (would you want this person judging you ?) - http://harrietmiers.blogspot.com/

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