See...nice works

Congrats to IBM for taking the lead in storage hardware sales. I bet the IDC results even caught them by surprise...

Lots of poo-pooing (again, with the poo-poo word?) will occur this week. The competitors will discount the findings - oh, well, we don't care about tape anyway so its not fair...they are taking credit for our NAS systems so its not fair...they don't make their own arrays so its not fair...

Uuuugh! I am so glad I am not in the marketing departments of the losers today.

The truth is that IBM can still sell tape - they know how to milk a laggard market segment like nobody's business. They have a strong virtualization story. They are leveraging the heck out of their NTAP and LSI relationships. They know how to deliver services. Bloody good for bloody them. Way to kick some disk, blue!

HP was rudderless for most of 2006 - a cynic might argue, much longer than that...(Good luck turning the battleship, Dave, we are rooting for you!!)

Sun dropped the STK tape lead balloon on its own toe...ADIC disappeared...

You all know the environmentals.

Meanwhile , IBM is like a big vacuum cleaner, sucking up business around the world, by making storage simple, and being nice.

I'm sure honestly, that nice really did have a lot to do with it. Wouldn't you rather buy your storage from nice, clean, well-dressed, seemingly honest people, who earnestly are trying to help you?

A sure sign of my OSG-ness is that I am losing my edge for absolute lowest price in everything. I used to work for hours on the internet to get the best price on every little thing - until I realized somewhere along the OSG line that the time and effort spent searching for the lowest price - and the risk I was taking buying from Joe's Cheepo Hifi.com wasn't worth the time away from other more interesting and useful pursuits - like writing a blog for instance. So, now I look for value - as measured by low-risk, ease of access, pleasurable transaction, and quality product/service.

My OSG take is that the storage industry is maturing too - just like us OSGers in it.

Storage customers want solutions to business problems - like unrelenting data growth, and spiraling management costs. Sure, they want the coolest, best technology in their storage infrastructure - just like I want the coolest, best technology in my boy-toys (er..old man toys).

But...(remember the BUT)...the numbers don't lie - customers are voting with their wallets and clearly are buying simple stuff that works from nice people who want to make them happy...