Third Mover Advantage
Coho ran into an all-too-common problem for storage startups: storage customers are hard to evangelize. They have pressing, immediate problems. They want solutions to those problems, and ideally solutions that fit into their current paradigm. Getting them to look forward to the *next* set of problems is really really hard. Coho had looked ahead, seen a problem on the horizon, developed some interesting technology to address it ... and then found themselves too far ahead of the customers to get any revenue out of all that. Like other technologies (*ahem* CDP) it will be not the originators but some late-arriving copycats who hit the right market window to benefit. With luck, some of the people who actually had the vision and made the efforts will get to ride the gravy train a few years from now, but in my experience that happens all too rarely.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
