The difference between a rant and thought diarrheaship.

Its been pretty quiet in the storage blogosphere so far in 2010.  Innocuous stuff.  No smack ups.  We all got the message late last year that readers were fed up with vendor bashing.  Well, the truce apparently can't last forever - or can it?

One of the most followed storage bloggers who works for a very large storage company wrote a post today that he characterized as a rant.  It wasn't much of a rant, but there were certainly aspects of it that fit this part of the Merriam-Webster definition:

    to utter in a bombastic declamatory fashion.

I think of rants as having elements of dark humor and scathing, pointed accusations.  This bombast had neither, but it did have pieces of whine mixed in.  Whining about how a competitor of theirs, 3PAR had come out with a program that they don't have an answer to.  Whine-bast that their strengths should be considered as the only ones that matter.  A general whine-bast that they should be the only ones allowed to make the rules.  A load of baloney, but not anything truly disgusting.

    Sort of a thought diarrheaship piece.

Does anybody actually get anything out of reading such tripe?

Comments

[Adam Day]

I really enjoyed the comments around gaps in the portfolio and trying to make products fit the need (which I included below).

I have many times had the pleasure of competing with EMC - and a common sales strategy is to change proposed products mid opportunity , usually to fit budget constraints or match alternate solutions, let alone caring for the customer's actual requirement.

I have to wonder why EMC would first recommend a V-MAX, if they feel that's what the need requires, and be able to switch so quickly to something else, along the lines of:

"Oh you can’t afford a V-MAX even at those discounts; well then Clarion will definitely be able to do it for you just as well."

Why do EMC need so many products when they all seem fulfill the customers every need so well.

Perhaps the majority of customers have similar issues and needs and can be addressed by a simplified portfolio - or am I stretching!

"Of course, if you're a vendor, and you have gaps in your portfolio, you try and steer the conversation away from what you don't have, and towards what you do have. I get that.

But sometimes that sort of thinking can put a customer at risk -- and that's where I start to rant."