{"id":3065,"date":"2011-04-29T16:25:59","date_gmt":"2011-04-29T06:25:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=3065"},"modified":"2011-04-29T16:25:59","modified_gmt":"2011-04-29T06:25:59","slug":"did-netapp-jump-the-shark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2011\/04\/29\/did-netapp-jump-the-shark\/","title":{"rendered":"Did NetApp jump the shark?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>. The basic premise though comes direct from the decline and fall of Happy Days, and is summed up as:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It started with a tweet<\/a> by John Martin, aka @life_no_borders<\/a>:<\/p>\n

When a customer says “NetApp is contributing more auditable financial benefit than every other technology vendor combined” it makes me proud<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you’re not familiar with him, John is a senior NetApp employee in Australia.\u00a0(Obviously John, as an Australian, had a different perspective here to me.)<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

I am not, in any way, questioning what John has said. A customer may very well have said that. That’s not my point.<\/em><\/p>\n

My point is that the statement jars. It’s odd<\/em>. It’s jarring \u2013 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 \u2013 particularly in the IT world \u2013 an unbelievably good compliment just comes across as jumping the shark.<\/p>\n

I wasn’t the only person who thought this. Matt Davis<\/a> aka @da5is<\/a>, an extremely good techo in the storage industry, tweeted<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“one vendor saved me more money than all others” is either fanboism or incompetence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

However raising it against a person or a company on the storage<\/em> front isn’t something you regularly hear, yet it comes close to explaining that jarring sensation when reading John’s original quote.<\/p>\n

John replied to Matt at this point<\/a>:<\/p>\n

@da5is Neither fanboi or incompetence, just brilliant execution from a NetApp reseller and services team delivering on their promises.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Phil Jaenke aka @rootwyrm<\/a> also weighed in helping to highlight the silliness of the entire thing<\/a>:<\/p>\n

@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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So what’s the story here? Did NetApp earn such a quote from a customer? Very likely \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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?”<\/p>\n

\"NetApp<\/a><\/p>\n

What do you think? Did they jump the shark?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’re not familiar with the term jumping the shark, you might want to read up on the history of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,13],"tags":[577,622],"class_list":["post-3065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-technology","category-general-thoughts","tag-marketing","tag-netapp"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-Nr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3065\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}