The Battle of Words

The hardest problem for any new or would be analyst to get a grip on is always the dreaded "misquote". The fact is, a good analyst will spend an inordinate amount of time with the media trying to help them frame real issues and as such help them understand what it is they are really talking about. With this comment I refer more so to those analysts who have yet to lose the will to live, and as such still consider themselves not to be crusty old men – often resembling Dick Cheney. Most writers are briefed by a vendor, try to shower off the B.S. and then try to hit their deadlines.

A good journalist actually cares about things that are very, very hard to care about. Writing about IT infrastructure has got to be hard to ever care about – and I think that's why we turn so many of them eventually. The peace corp.? Flower shops? Wax manufacturing? Sure, those are easy. IT is so boring just talking about it will turn the Dali Llama violent. Most tech writers seem to be good people, or those on work release perhaps, and most seem to enjoy the sport of fishing thru the crap trying to find a semblance of reality. At the end of the story, however, they all need the sound bite.

So this week I had the chance to cause either a love fest or a lynch mob, with the same two companies, the same paper, and even the same journalist. I'm not sure how it all went down.

I got a call from IBM asking if I would speak to the Wall St. Journal regarding XIV. Surprisingly, I said yes. An hour later I got a call from EMC asking me if I would speak to the Journal about their new Symmetrix announcement. I said yes again. It turned out, it was the same reporter, so how very convenient, I thought. They ended up being two very different interviews.

During my annual practice manager meeting at Pinz, Milford, MA's mega-bowling meeting facility, I got the first call regarding XIV. That conversation was all about the reporter attempting to understand or quantify the outrageous rumors surrounding the parting of ways between Moshe Yanai and EMC – folks who made each other very large piles of money. There were excellent questions about broken chairs and virtual fist fights – none of which I could comment on (only because I wasn't there, and the parties that were there weren't talking). At the end of the long conversation, I felt I had adequately explained why the XIV stuff (Moshe's new thing that IBM bought) was theoretically cool, but not really a threat to neither EMC nor IBM's core high-end business – that this represented a commercial application of the "Google" storage phenomenon. He bought it, I bought it, and onwards we go. In the paper the next day, my pithy (and completely brilliant) comments were omitted from the article, and instead left to the non-pithy, somewhat less than completely brilliant commentary of others. (Perhaps I'm jaded; maybe they were both pithy and brilliant, but I doubt either referred to the Mossad). I was shunned in the editorial process. I felt ok, though, as I know I taught the young man a thing or two that he had absolutely no interest in learning.

The next morning my phone rang from the very same gentleman reporter guy. This time, he wanted to talk about EMC's new magical announcement on the Symmetrix 8 million, or whatever the current model is. This time it was about a technology component – namely flash inside the uber array. I spent the same hour attempting to pass on decades of wisdom that no one cares about (including my wife and kids, dog, cat, and mailperson) to find a point he could rally around. I came up with this: "in these circles, performance matters. There are a certain small number of folks who simply can never get enough of it, and are willing to pay thru the nose to get it. If, in those application environments, the performance delta is as I suspect – large – then it means that IBM and HDS will be behind the eight-ball until they respond in kind". Simple, factual, and accurate. They printed "HDS and IBM are screwed". (Subtle paraphrasing on my part). Now, in certain places, IF the stuff works, and IF folks buy it, IBM and HDS could be screwed for a while – until they address the issue. The problem is no one is screwed forever, only until the next marketing cycle. The battle of the word is a hard one. If Andy Monshaw cried on TV, would people go back to Shark? Hey, it worked for Hillary. Plus, Andy is more believable.

So go easy on your friends who try to tell the truth. Sometimes an editor who doesn't know Flash disk from Flash in the Pan (walking, walking, in the rain…..) is cutting out words to fit the page. Stop shooting the poor teacher. The day before I spend a ridiculous amount of time attempting to educate the reporter on the fact that there might be some merit to IBM buying XIV (instead of for spite and other ill advised emotional outbursts), IBM folks were none too happy with me for being misquoted on the XIV technology saying it could eventually replace the DS8000. It could do that, but my quote was that this technology, once proven out, should be leveraged across the back end of every storage product IBM has, DS included. They probably would have been happy had that been printed.

So, in conclusion, don't put all that much stock in what you read, as the process is designed to be incomplete and often downright inaccurate. We all do the best we can……… (He said what about his "can"?) Go Pats. (He said he wanted to pat his can?).