If you’re not familiar with the term jumping the shark, you might want to read up on the history of it over at Wikipedia. The basic premise though comes direct from the decline and fall of Happy Days, and is summed up as:
Jumping the shark is a widely used idiom, first employed to describe a moment in the evolution of a television show, characterized by absurdity, when a particular show abandons its core premises and begins a decline in quality that is beyond recovery.
Now, I’ve worked for companies that have had partnerships with EMC for the last 11 years, and you can take what I’m about to say with whatever grain of salt or assumption of bias, but I’d like to think that I’m actually speaking more from the Australian perspective of not tooting ones horn in a way that goes completely overboard.
It started with a tweet by John Martin, aka @life_no_borders:
When a customer says “NetApp is contributing more auditable financial benefit than every other technology vendor combined” it makes me proud
If you’re not familiar with him, John is a senior NetApp employee in Australia. (Obviously John, as an Australian, had a different perspective here to me.)
Once this was Tweeted by John it was picked up and retweeted by a couple of other NetApp twitterers, and I want to make myself 100% clear here:
I am not, in any way, questioning what John has said. A customer may very well have said that. That’s not my point.
My point is that the statement jars. It’s odd. It’s jarring – there’s some compliments that … let’s just say … come out wrong. Like the time someone told one of the directors at my previous company, “You should bottle Preston’s blood.” Sure, there’s a compliment, but sometimes – particularly in the IT world – an unbelievably good compliment just comes across as jumping the shark.
I wasn’t the only person who thought this. Matt Davis aka @da5is, an extremely good techo in the storage industry, tweeted:
“one vendor saved me more money than all others” is either fanboism or incompetence.
Now, to be accused of fanboism in say, the competition between Apple, Microsoft and Google is a daily event for some people. I know people call me an Appletard and an Apple Fanboi regularly, and I’ve argued that this isn’t the case. And despite their opinions of me on that front, I value their insight.
However raising it against a person or a company on the storage front isn’t something you regularly hear, yet it comes close to explaining that jarring sensation when reading John’s original quote.
John replied to Matt at this point:
@da5is Neither fanboi or incompetence, just brilliant execution from a NetApp reseller and services team delivering on their promises.
Phil Jaenke aka @rootwyrm also weighed in helping to highlight the silliness of the entire thing:
@life_no_borders @da5is No, it really isn’t. No vendor would sit down and take it, and I know two that would cut off NetApp’s legs to win.
So what’s the story here? Did NetApp earn such a quote from a customer? Very likely – and very likely that every other vendor out there and any decent systems integrator worth their salt out there has also received a similar compliment at some point or another.
Accurate customer quote or not, I just don’t see an average manager looking at the quote and saying “OK, you’ve sold me”. If I were a betting man, I’d probably look at the average Australian manager and lay $10 that they’d think something along the lines of: “NetApp, did you just jump the shark?”
What do you think? Did they jump the shark?
Just to clarify my meaning a bit; when I say “cut off NetApp’s legs” I mean that if a customer says “we’re considering this and that from NetApp” these vendors will not hesitate to eat a HUGE loss just to ensure NetApp doesn’t get the sale. They will do whatever it takes to cut NetApp’s legs out from under them.
Thus, the only possible conclusion is that these vendors were excluded from consideration for one reason or another. I don’t know about you, but I certainly wouldn’t be crowing about having already made up my mind, then creating data to justify it after the fact.
Hi Preston:
Even with considerable biases intact (I work for EMC), there’s certainly something going on here worth noting and commenting about. Many of the statements made by the Australian NetApp fanboi crowd have been continually marching towards the surreal.
It’s an interesting study in psychology, to be sure.
I would agree with you, it seems to be an Australian thing — you don’t get the same level of I-can’t-imagine-anyone-would-say-that statements from elsewhere in the world. Early on, I attempted to challenge some of the more egregious statements, and was consistently met with tribal hostility vs. intelligent discussion.
So, as all things Internet, I’ve simply filtered out these people, and trust that Darwinism is still at work …
— Chuck
I know EMC dropped its price a far bit for us when we had a NetApp vs EMC situation. However I would say it was netapp’s rigid feature sets that lost them the contract. We wanted just NFS out of a set of features, and they couldn’t do it and insisted in including lots of features we didn’t need to get NFS, pushing the price way over EMC.