I joined Twitter about 6 months ago, having resisted it for some time. My only regret now is that I didn’t join it earlier, but suffice it to say I think it has great potential as a knowledge collective tool, and as a means of people from disparate places over the world staying in touch without the formality of email or the one-on-one nature of instant messaging. It’s not always perfect for every situation, but it’s definitely useful.
I follow four main types of people:
- Vendor employees
- End users
- Other IT workers (resellers, journalists, etc.)
- Thinkers*
Of course, there’s the odd celebrity thrown in there, but not the ones you might normally think of. As to vendor employees, and where I refer to “vendors” in the following, I’m not exclusively talking of EMC. NetApp, Compellent, Symantec, Xiotech, 3Par, EMC, Emulex, etc., all fall into the general “vendor” clump for what I’m talking about in this post.
Where was I? Ah yes, I need to bring this back to something to do with backup – or at least IT. Rest assured, that was my intent from the start. I am typing from a position of a nasty cold and food poisoning, so my mind wanders more easily than Ross Noble at the moment.
If I look at the people in technical fields that I follow, I notice something really interesting about the use of industry analysts. You know, the “respected” heavyweights such as Gartner, ICT, etc. I can sum this up with a single sentence:
The only people you can be guaranteed aren’t talking about the industry analysts are the end users.
The incredibly ironic thing about this of course is that if the analysts were doing things right, the people who would be most interested in their reports would be the end users.
In less charitable moments over the years I’ve used the term “circle jerk” to collectively define groups of industry analysts, in much the way that you might describe a “pride of lions”. What is telling about the lack of end-users talking about the industry analysts is that I’m not alone in those less-than-charitable thoughts.
Why is this the case? I think there’s three key reasons – and the final one only came to me in the last few days. These are:
- Perceived lack of independence. Rightly or wrongly, end-users frequently don’t trust that the analysts are independent. I’d like to think better of them and suggest that this is a result of how analyst findings are used. Vendors tend to cherry-pick analyst reports, quotes and findings. This of course is entirely logical and from a business perspective, entirely reasonable. If you’ve got a message to tell customers (and the market in general), you pick the details that help tell that message. So of course, given that the average person only sees analyst data that’s been released by vendors (because individual user access to analyst reports is just so damn cost-prohibitive) it creates the appearance that the analysts are working hand-in-hand with the vendors. It’s a very big case of chicken-and-egg.
- Facts vs fluffy statements. Most analyst statements that get out into the (tech) mainstream that aren’t vendor-released tend to be full of rather fluffy statements rather than strong fact. I’m betting that most techos don’t really have much time for astrology, and unfortunately the very fluffy reports about “By 2016 X PB of data will be produced monthly…” sort of statements are about as exciting as reading your daily horoscope.
- The lack of why. This is the one that came to me in the last few days. I recently watching Simon Sinek’s presentation for TED, “How great leaders inspire action“, and as a consequence I’ve started to read his book, Start With Why. If there’s a core lesson in Simon’s work it seems to be this most basic premise: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”
When I saw another vendor tweet around another analyst report, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe the reason why end-users don’t talk about (and are mostly uninterested in) analyst reports is because they’re not seeing a why to buy into. They see what the analysts do, but they just don’t see the why. Without the why, there’s no trust, there’s no reason to engage with.
The only ones that can fix that issue are the analysts themselves. This though leads to the next question: who are the real customers of the analysts? End-users (i.e., IT generally), or vendors?
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* “Thinkers” is a broad category of basically people who I find interesting, and they range from @DerrenBrown to @StephenFry to @Zephoria to @TheUngayGuy with a whole bunch of coverage in-between. (You might say that they’re probably most of all the people who I’d be extremely chuffed about being able to sit down for a coffee and a lengthy chat with.)