Those vendor blog sods fog the cogs. Wish they'd slog for user bods

Today is the fifth anniversary of the Storagebod blog. I had blogged a bit before and had commented on various posts about storage, but nearly all of them – and indeed, enterprise technology blogs in general – were aimed at vendors and resellers. The voice of the “user” was mostly missing… and so Storagebod was born. At the …

[Anonymous Coward]

Vendor blogs totally miss the entire mid-market

My problem with vendor blogs and many industry blogs is that they all focus on the top end of the market, the top 1% of enterprise users who actually care about being able to squeeze a bazillion IOPS out of their array and want to scale to XB's and beyond.

I've been working in storage for a long time and I can safely say that 90% of the mid market customers (and there are lots of them) really don't care who can go fastest. All they want is a simple life where they can protect their data in a quick, simple, and repeatable manner, and when things go wrong they want to be able to get it back quickly. I don't know any vendor who actually aims any blogs or marketing effort at this much abused user community - bizarrely it's their biggest growth market

As an example, 100% of the top vendors are obsessed with Big Data. I spoke to 50 of my customers over the last 2-weeks and 95% of them couldn't have cared less about Big Data, it was irrelevant to them. These customers have on average 200-400TB of capacity each - not huge, but not small.

[SeymourHolz]

>> If you work in marketing or social and you see something written that you don’t like, the first reaction should not be to try and get that person "on-message"...

Well-intentioned advice, but perhaps impossible for large vendors to actually implement.

When a company exceeds about ~3000 people, it becomes a bureaucracy. When companies are small, they are similar to tribes, where cooperative behaviors clearly advance both selfish and collective interests. Bureaucracies are fundamentally different; conformity trumps results. Ceremony trumps outcomes. The contrast is nearly as sharp as the contrast between centrally-planned state economies and decentralized laissez-faire state economies. The latter is vigorous, progressive and chaotic, while the former is lethargic, stagnant and predictable.

Start-ups are perennially successful a penetrating all markets, even ones with very high barriers to entry, specifically because of this problem in scaling human organizations.

[ecofeco]

Marketing and HR

Marketing and Human Resources have far, far, to much power in the modern corporation these days and more often than not, are THE biggest impedance, obstacle, fucktard disaster, to ever happen to modern business.