IBM and Sun - Conspiracy Theory

I remained convinced of two things; first, the deal won't happen, and second, someone clearly leaked the deal.

I'm on record earlier as to why the deal won't happen, and that hasn't changed.  It doesn't make sense to me.

The leak is interesting to speculate on.  I can't imagine IBM doing it - because they simply don't do that, and what possible motivation would they have?  Sun could have done it, because they are not exactly known as a logical, nor quiet, entity sometimes and might have felt they could get a bidding war going, which is precisely wrong - as it's proving out.  The bankers might have done it to try to get anything at all going, which means there never was a deal at all - and the bankers were hoping to create one by generating defensive bidding - which also proved out to be flawed.  While Sun is a more obvious potential leak than IBM, the bankers might be the truly guilty parties here.  Both would know that the Journal is the right place to leak - they will defend their sources to the death, and by having the Journal run the original story, it gives it credibility instantly - regardless of the fact that it may end up that they were played like a fiddle.

Weekend Update

Warning: This blog has pretty much nothing to do with business or IT, but does include giant football players, Dracula, indecent exposure, and mold.

The past weekend was to be a nice, quick golfing getaway down in Orlando. Iron Mountain mucky muck Bob Brennan was kind enough to take the bull by the horns and put some semblance of structure to the event, as it wouldn't have ever happened otherwise. To be fair, his supremely competent assistant Marianne actually did everything.

Anyhow, I love golf, and was so bummed out at how little I played last year, I was determined to make it work. I knew a few guys that were going, including a college pal I hadn't seen in a long time, so what the heck. I took my pal and CFO Walter, and my ridiculously large football playing buddy Vince (Wilfork – aka the walking solar eclipse) down to Orlando for some fun.

The first thing I saw upon landing when I turned on my phone (iPhone battery's suck beyond belief, fyi) was a text from my wife – at 12:12pm - telling me about some guy who parked next to her at Target and decided to pleasure himself.  

That's what happens when I go away golfing. Who is so hot and bothered that they can't wait long enough to leave the Target parking lot? Worse, Jess was driving my truck because her car was dead because Michael was using it as his private theater in the garage to watch some DVD. Maybe the guy was really waiting for me. Eeeew is right.

We got to the place (Grand Cypress), had a cocktail, and mounted up for some afternoon golf. There were multiple courses – South, East, North, and "New". Talk about just giving up on marketing. "New"? West might have worked in that theme, but what do I know. We played the "New" course. Not having swung a club for six months, I completely expected to be stellar. I always think I'm going to be stellar. It's a gift really. It rarely ever happens, unfortunately, as I have mastered that particular mental aspect. Walter hit his drive 8 feet. Vince hit his drive off of the space shuttle, landing a tad over 310 yards. I stumbled through the first hole, and then got to the par 5 second – which I promptly eagled. That was a mistake. I got an 11 on the third. Then it got bad. By the end of the round it was darker than Vince, so off to the bar we went. Only one moron fan acted ridiculous – a Pittsburgh fan no less – when the idiot actually asked Vince if he was a defensive back. The guy is 375lbs. He eats defensive backs the way I eat chicken wings. Bonehead.

Vince's wife Bianca came by and joined us for dinner, then promptly took big V back to the condo. That would have been a good idea. Walter and I sat at the bar and watched basketball, while drinking way too much. Our condo was 45 feet from where we were sitting, but the bartender insisted we take the shuttle back to our room. She was clearly afraid I would fall into a puddle and have my head removed by an alligator. Probably a good move.

I awoke at the crack of 7 feeling as though I got run over by a truck. Is it bad when you are 45 and 18 holes of golf (riding) makes you feel like you were really Bruce Willis in any of the Die Hards? It's probably bad. We played 27 Saturday, when Vince got the call that the 8 billion pound pump that waters his orange groves 30 minutes away blew up. Five minutes later my wife called to let me know that a pipe burst back home and we have a serious mold and rot problem. Awesome. This was becoming an expensive outing.

We all went back to the sports bar and watched a ton of games, including one of the best ever. The "tournament" was named the "Daddy-O", and while I'm not really sure why, it has something to do with Bob's father in law, who is Hungarian. Nice guy. Kept calling me a marine due to my haircut and while I assured him my haircut is the only thing I have in common with a real marine, he didn't seem to care. If I were an actual marine, we would be in lots of trouble. His accent was very deep and I was finding him more difficult to understand the more I drank, and as such kept looking to Bob for translation. Finally, Bob said, "why does everyone assume I know what he's saying? Do I speak Dracula? I think he said he wants to go hang upside down in the closet for a while…" (with Daddy-O sitting right there). I almost blew bad red wine out my nostrils.

Sunday we played in a torrential downpour, lasted 9, and quit. Jet Blue, greatest of all airlines, kept me entertained as I watch Oklahoma toss up bomb after bomb against UNC and then Tiger being Tiger. Can you imagine going into the final day with a 5 shot lead versus Tiger? I would have stayed in bed. He sinks a 16 footer to win on 18, while I would have been happy with a three-putt. Good thing I'm good at other things, whatever they might be. Later today I'm going by Vince's to see his new, completely ridiculous truck – literally the biggest ever – International CXT.

UPDATE: I forgot this part. 

On the way from the airport in Orlando  we had to drive to wide receiver (now on Denver) Jabar Gaffney’s house, so Vince could steal some clubs.  Jabar looks like a little teeny guy on TV, but he isn’t.  He’s huge.  He’s huge and runs faster than my car.  On the way to Jabar’s, Vince called him, said things I couldn’t understand mixed in with words and expressions such as “holla at ya” and “word dog”, and concluded his conversation with “ok, what is the code?  Ok, it will be a little white guy’s voice….”  As I drove into the development and put in the code, a nice woman answered and as soon as I said “Hi” she knew I was the little white guy somehow and immediately buzzed me through.  It was very efficient.

EMC smacked for Green goofs

Chris Mellor of the The Register hammered EMC in this post today, basically making it out that EMC sits on the board of the "Green Grid" and touts other green initiatives and support for the global cause - but does so while flying around in private jets.

The article is good and entertaining, but not totally fair in that it that it assumes malice (at least I took it so), and that's not realistic.

Where he is absolutely correct is the subtle assertion that EMC simply doesn't have it's green story together.  I have personally told this to both Mr. Tucci and mean it. 

I had challenged Mr. T and EMC about this, and while it tood a while to wrangle resources, I can openly say that in my 145 years of dealing with the company, myself and other ESG'ers were invited into perhaps the most transparent and honest meeting ever - which included the senior most senior managers from every single department in the company (engineering, manufacturing, facilities, etc.).  The good news, is we were blown away at how much EMC walked the green walk - and how odd it was that they didn't talk the talk.

EMC, like most real businesses, is not about simply doing things because it is good karma.  They are about making money when you net it all out.  Having said that, they are also smart - they started LONG ago with internal focus on green and efficiency - and the two objectives clearly successfully intersect.  EMC save tens of millions of bucks every year doing things to reduce power and create efficiencies.  Hell, I remember back in 1986 or so, their first real Hopkinton headquarters building utilized some crazy Nordic air conditioning system that somehow recycled itself and cost them an extra $10 million bucks - which subsequently has paid for itself 10 times over. 

How ironic is it that it turns out that EMC really is focused INTERNALLY on all things green - for all the right reasons - and yet lags with its external messaging to the world?  Normally - and no offense intended - it's the exact opposite.  I'd expect fantastic overall messaging and leadership externally, only to find out that internally things aren't quite as advertised - but not in this case.  Maybe Chris's article will make them put some emphasis on this, as it clearly is not a top priority, though I personally think it's a mistake and not for making themselves feel good - but I know that the things they do are leadership things, and by telling the world it would be good for business.

Anyhow, the jet issue is sort of silly.  Chris rightfully points out that Warmenhoven and Chambers also fly around in private jets.  Of course they do.  Warmenhoven pays for it himself - he only charges the company the price of a first class commercial ticket - fyi.  What multi-billion dollar international company does not utilize private jets for big mucky mucks to get around?  As a stockholder, or anyone with basic common sense, do I want my CEO spending endless hours of time dealing with airport b.s. versus getting where they need to be and bringing home the bacon?  No.  For real businesses, private jets are not vanity, they are the only reasonable means of mucky muck travel.  Do the math - if your CEO is making $10M a year, that averages out to a cost of around $4,000 per hour of work time.  Do I want to pay that to have them stand in line at an airport, sit on a crappy commercial plane where they can't use their phone, computer, etc. and arrive at their destination miserable and frumpy?  No.  That's what the rest of us are there for.  Worse, do I want the CEO sitting in their office all day managing from afar?  Doesn't work that way.  Someone has to be where the deals are.

Now, if it turns out that Mr. CEO is just taking joy rides to show off to their friends, that's a different story, but I'm fairly sure Mr. Chambers, Schmidt, Buffett, Gates, Hurd, Palmisano, etc. aren't just letting those babies idle on the tarmac unnecessarily to impress the chicks.  Time is money, and money makes the world go round.  You can't do work for the greater good if you aren't in business.  Thus first you make sure what you do is the most intelligent thing you can to make money - then you can focus on the trees.

I'm willing to bet that when Larry Ellison blasts around the sky in his fighter plane, for absolutely no legitimate business purpose at all, he offsets his "because he can" environmental damage in other ways.  I'm not saying this is right, but give a guy a break.  It's hard to spend that much money without causing a little bit of mayhem.

Plus, I'm jealous.  I would LOVE to escape the torture of commercial travel.  It's become completely uncivilized.  Nice work Chris.

Head in the Cloud? Or Just up your……..?

Online backup vendor Carbonite filed a lawsuit in Suffolk Superior Court this week charging its vendor, Promise Technology, with fraud, unfair and deceptive business practices, and breach of contract for supplying it with $3M worth of defective storage. It also charged its SI, Interactive Digital Systems, with breach of warranty. Apparently over 7500 customers lost data. Oops.

Duh. Promise Technology? Really? You built a backup and recovery SaaS operation based on the cheapest stuff you could find – and (gasp), it failed? How surprising. Carbonite should be sued for being either idiots or horrendously naïve for thinking anything except something like this could happen. Do they serve week old Tuna sandwiches in the corporate cafeteria since they are cheaper and then wonder why they have a 60% call in sick rate? Last year's flu shots are a steal, I hear.

They could probably save a lot of money by repurposing toilet paper too. That would be nice.

I guess I understand their reaction – taking the offensive and all, but I sure don't understand the point to begin with. Carbonite isn't the only one of course, last August, EMC Mozy was embarrassed by a much-publicized customer recovery situation where it took days to just assemble the customer's data for recovery and then another 24 hours before a staffer personally transported a portable storage device to the customer. The cloud infrastructure supporting Mozy's service consists of commodity storage and a distributed RAID algorithm, which EMC Mozy touts as its "secret sauce" and allows the company to be disruptive with pricing. HP already shut down it's Upline service after a year. Wake up people – you get what you pay for. This stuff is great for free – and even well worth the risk at $50 bucks, but if you are stuffing critical corporate data onto these platforms expecting miracles for free, you are out of you mind. Problems restoring my personal naked "art" collection is one thing, but restoring my corporate mail server is something entirely different.

Last summer, ESG'er Lauren Whitehouse asked Carbonite CEO David Friend about SLAs and the company's failsafe mechanisms:

 

LW: What service level agreements (SLAs) are provided, if any?  

DF: "We provide SLAs to our marketing partners (like ISPs), but not to retail customers directly.   We've had almost no downtime in 2 years, and you probably wouldn't notice if we did (assuming it was of short duration)."

 

LW: What fail-safe mechanisms are in place to protect client data from a regional disaster at any of your 3 Boston data centers?

DF: "You mean like an atom bomb blowing up downtown Boston?  Regional power outages wouldn't matter (UPS).  Regional internet outages (we use multiple redundant carriers) would take us offline if they all failed.  But again, unless you were in the middle of a restore when it happened, you'd probably never notice.  Even then, the restore would automatically resume when the lights came back on.  We don't protect against the atom bomb scenario and we don't replicate data across multiple sites.  The likelihood of losing data because of software bugs or human error is probably orders of magnitude greater.  This is backup - not archiving, so if that ever happened you'd still have your data on your PC.  If you're doing archiving, then you'd probably want a service that used replicated data centers in different cities – these are a LOT more expensive, obviously."

 

LW: Litigation and Compliance Support - What services are offered for clients who have audit or eDiscovery requests?

DF: "If we are served with a valid court order or search warrant, we'd have to comply, of course (I'm not interested in going to jail).   If you have elected to keep your own encryption key, however, all we could deliver is encrypted data.  I don't know what an eDiscovery request is."

 

The latest event, coupled with the Mozy debacle and HP failure, highlight the risk of not vetting cloud-based backup vendors.

 

At $50/year for unlimited backup storage, you get what you pay for. This is what I worry about when it comes to the silly buzz around "Cloud". I worry about COMMERCIAL cloud services – those who house, process and deliver true commercial data – not just pictures of my lovely Lily wearing a tutu while hitting a baseball with her batting helmet on backwards. I worry about the fact that "cloud" will get a bad name because people make asinine assumptions and refuse to do any homework simply because they feel they can shift a burden elsewhere.

 

The cloud is going to be great – I have no doubt – assuming we all survive the silliness. The internet ended up being a pretty good thing, once we got rid of Moron.com and most of the ill-fated dopey ideas tossed at us. Pets.com? Seriously? Furniture.com? Really?

 

There are legitimate BUSINESS oriented backup service providers. There are little guys who do a great a job with SMB's like VaultLogix. There are big guys who do nice work like Iron Mountain and IBM. There is perhaps the best kept secret of the entire commercial service providing world, Asigra, who has been successfully enabling mission critical remote backup for over 20 years – with a customer list that is the "who's who" of the business world. These guys charge you for services; however, they probably don't store your data in a tin can or a first generation iPod. There is a fairly good chance that you will actually be able to get your data back when you need it.

 

Which (finally) gets me to the point – don't just assume. Ask. Find out HOW your provider does their thing – what is their infrastructure? What are their operational policies and practices? Would you hire their IT guy? Can they prove they are doing what they are supposed to be doing? If the answer is no, or "huh?", run away. Go buy a disk yourself and back stuff up – in case you haven't noticed, they cost less than a grilled cheese sandwich.

 

If you want to be a serious Cloud service provider – do what NO real IT show will – be totally transparent. Go out of your way to tell everyone about your failures – exactly what happened, exactly what you did about it, and exactly what the outcome was. If you want me to trust you, then why not? I am not an idiot – I know things break. What I don't know is how often they break, or why, and most importantly – what you do about it. Show me how you did suffer a meltdown but didn't lose my data – and how you are now going to put a vendor onto the rack of death until they either fix the problem or get tossed out. Proactively send me a report on what screwed up in your shop this month, and what you did to correct it. That would be worth investing in.

IBM to buy Sun?

Pro's - Solaris/Sun have big footprint in big data centers running big Oracle app's.  Big Oracle shops spend big money and buy big stuff.  Solaris works, and big Sparc's work so the only real reason to run away from that is Intel/Linux but that movement seems weak in this specific arena.  Thus, Sun remaining viable has an install base that is absolutely valuable - shrinking, but valuable. 

Solaris is enterprise critical, but so was VMS.  I'm not sure that no matter how great it is, anyone would continue to push it in the face of the Linux realities.  Sparc?  Probably not.  Most systems they ship are already x86 now, so I can't imagine continued development expense gets sunk into Sparc.  If IBM is serious, however, they have proven they can take a corner case architecture and make a lot of money on it for a long time - i.e. the Mainframe and AS400.  I don't see this being the same game, but it does show that they can do stuff like this when it makes sense.  If there is enough money in it, they can wait out the whole market until it becomes a monopoly.

What's left of STK means IBM owns the entire market for high-end tape. 

IGS should find itself a lot of new opportunities inside that base.

Con's - It seems expensive, and most likely will only get cheaper.  Sun has been progressing nowhere but down over the last half decade and forces are not moving in their favor.  It would require someone like IBM to be able to recoup that kind of investment in that size customer base.  It will be a lot of work for IBM to quickly identify and get to the customer base less those customers who aren't hip to the IBM play will most likely accellerate their plans to run away.

Other - this could all be total bullsh&t.  I've started rumors bigger than this one.

Cisco, Twitter, and Louis C.K.

I have entered the Twitter experiment.  To be completely candid, I think that there is a better than average chance this will end up a big mistake, as the LAST thing I need (and hopefully you too) is a new means of availing myself to spammers.  However, I've been yelled at enough to the point where I am now official.

If you want to follow along with my exploits, by all means do so - i'm "Stevedupe" in the land of tweets.

I promise not to tell everyone when I am going to the bathroom, unless of course something funny occurs while doing so.

I joined Friday night but I waited to see if anything of interest came about on the big Cisco announcement today (http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/ESGPublications/BriefPopup.asp?ReportID=1181) on Twitter.  There was a ton of activity - mostly wrong, mostly junk, but a ton nonetheless.  Thus, I shall see if the medium holds merit for those of us who care about such things, or bail out if it becomes a nuisance.

My take on Cisco - way smart, way interesting, and way out there.  How much it will matter to HP and IBM - who they really must have irritated with all of this - depends on how they price the stuff.

I know this - VMware couldn't be any happier about it - and why not?  They need to get moving towards ubiquity - and having a purpose built hunk of iron like this will only help their cause.

Back to Cisco - why not do what they did, but at the same time announce the form factor as a standard and let HP and IBM etc. build blades that fit the box?  I can't imagine Cisco really cares about selling Intel chips that much, and since the value appears to really be in the collapsed unified networking and overall packaging, who not let your former best friends come along for the ride?

They are a machine to be reckoned with.  They had a lot of big players along for the ride - EMC, VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.  It was well played really.  I'm most curious to understand the way it's priced, because conceivably, dumb pricing might actually push people away and back to IBM or HP. 

IBM sells a billion bucks worth of Cisco a year - plus all the services and things it drags with it.  I figure they probably make 20% GP anyhow on the branded resale business - so that's $200+ million a year right to the bottom line.  They sure aren't gonna be happy about a new server competitor, but will they be so pissed that they walk from that dough?  I don't think so - at least not in the short term.

HP on the other hand, is different.  They have their own ProCurve networking gear - at least for edge switching - that costs half of what Cisco charges.  I'm fairly confident we'll see them go full bore away from Cisco whenever they can, and I can't blame them.  The C-class blades have been kicking butt and this sure won't help things along. 

The IGS and EDS plays are wildcards - this stuff is built for the "next" data center - not so much as a replacement as far as I can tell, and IGS/EDS are likely candidates to be brought to the table for such discussions.  If both of them hold positions of influence, they could put the old Heisman up to Cisco's forehead (stiff arm block).

Will be interesting for a while no matter what.

Which gets me to my Saturday night.  Went to see comedian and former Bostonian Louis C.K. at the craphole known as the Orpheum theater.  He might be the funniest person I've seen in many, many years.  Anyone who can call his 5-year old an asshole and be funny about it is OK in my book.  Louis tweets also, fyi.  I don't think he follows me yet, however.

HDS moves west....

HDS, Hitachi Data Systems has forever been the industry's poster child of the consummate Japanese technology company - brilliant engineering, unquestionable quality, and a complete void of the creativity that has been a Hallmark of the west.  It seems that is changing.

HDS is a wholly owned subsidiary of the absurdly large Hitachi, Ltd., a roughly $130B global player in everything from power generation systems to super-trains to micro-electronic components. 

HDS itself is a profitable, double digit growth entity that sells billions of dollars of high-end storage systems every year - despite being about as exciting as 3 day Cricket match which ends in a draw, nil-nil.

Dave Roberson was the American senior executive at HDS for what seems like decades.  A few years ago, he decided to move from the decidedly stable Japanese culture and inject himself into HP - a decidedly different kind of place.  Enter Jack Domme.

Jack, a curly haired blonde that looks about as non-Japanese as is imaginable, has quietly been shifting the HDS culture to become more global from an operating perspective.  He figured out that having superior engineering and quality competency combined with more of the creative western thinking in terms of marketing, go to market strategies, and just plain out-of-the-box thinking would be a good combination.  It seems his bet has just paid off.

After years as COO, Jack was just announced as CEO of HDS, and I think he is the first gaijin to hold the job.  Nicely done.  Jack has added some serious talent around him over the last few years, including Brian Householder - a super smart, super nice, absurdly tall marketing mucky muck and most recently, EJ Schmidt, a former EMC marketing dude along with Asim Zaheer, a long time industry marketing guy with lots of scrappy start-up experience (and also unreasonably tall).

I can almost guarantee you that the boring HDS of old ain't gonna be as boring moving forward, and for that I am happy.  It's hard enough to try to make this industry interesting every day, let alone when a company like HDS used to show up with it's new product - all about how easy it is to use - with a presentation that is 198 slides long. So I'm not sure we'll be seeing any explosives, but I suspect they will be cooking up something that merits our attention. 

Is Quantum becoming the open standard dedupe?

Sometimes I'm slow to pick things up, but it just dawned on me that when Quantum announced dedupe OEM deals with EMC and Dell a few months ago, they just put themselves into a very interesting position.

EMC is going to use the Quantum stuff in several of their offerings. Dell appears to be coming out with one product, at least to start. What's interesting is that because all three folks use the same code in those products, they will interoperate. An EMC system will replicate to a Dell system which will replicate to a Quantum system. That opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities – which were lost on me previously.

First, it lets all 3 vendors make an "open" claim, and do so with some legitimacy. There are 3 places right now that you can buy a product that guarantees compatibility with the offerings from the other two. Assuming the code isn't hacked at all (and I'm told it is not), that means if you bought a system from EMC but decided that you now hate the logo, you can replace it with a system from Quantum or Dell and it will just work. Or, you might buy someone with Quantum and you already have EMC, and you can just assume they will work compatibly. That's interesting. They all have different packaging options and pricing structures, so in theory a buyer can shop between them and pick the right set of configurations and functionality for their own needs, knowing if things change, they have options.

In the mid-market, Data Domain owns the perceptive (and real) market value. I contend that in any break-out market, beating the incumbent victor with a "but mine is better" strategy is a fool's errand. People are not interested in re-solving a problem that has been solved already when they must slay brand new dragons tomorrow. What does make this market potentially interesting however, is that while DD owns the hearts and minds of the masses, the actual footprint remains relatively small. DD has more than anyone (over 10,000 of these gizmo's last I looked), but out of the millions of potential spots it could go, it remains a small percentage. They need to continue to grow fast to lock out the marauding armies from hacking away. Big giant OEM's have the luxury of being big and giant, and as such, with a modicum of effort they can plop a lot of boxes in the world. While it remains to be seen if an initial buying decision will be based on the argument that de facto "openness" should be the top consideration – it clearly should be "a" consideration. History has proven that provided a choice in a market that is still in flux, with all things being equal the market will chose a "standard" that provides choice. It happened with the Cisco router. It happened with the NetApp filer. Cisco was the de facto standard because they connected to the most things (while the big guys tried to insist no one needed to connect to anything but their stuff). NetApp used standard hardware and NFS. Once the landscape is truly dominated by one player, then they have become the de facto standard and it doesn't matter much if your solution is better, or more open, or makes toast for you. This market looks like there is still a little time to disrupt the Data Domain train – but not much.

I also have zero idea how aggressive EMC or Dell will be with this stuff, although it appears to clearly benefit their cause to be so. EMC has approximately 523 different dedupe offerings at last count, so I'm not sure the poor sales folk will be able to figure this out without some corporate direction. Dell is different, as they appear more focused and live in this market slice. Their issue is going to be Data Domain's sales force – which is big and good and getting bigger and gooder. Yes, I said gooder.

At the very least, it will help Quantum get over Data Domain FUD. If I'm Quantum and DD tells my customer "whoa, they are going out of business and they are convicted felons and they hate babies", (ok, they don't say most of that), I say, "look, we aren't going out of business – that's absurd – BUT let's just say we did all perish in a Hawaiian volcano incident, you can continue to buy and get support from EMC or Dell. You don't think they are going out of business do you?" followed up (or proceeded) by, "Dell and EMC are fairly large companies with fairly comprehensive financial and technical acumen – and they chose to OEM from Quantum. I'm fairly sure we didn't "bamboozle" both of them. They know what they are doing." I'm not that smart, but I'm pretty sure I could leverage the Dell or EMC relationship to put a halt to that one.

Small is the new big…..

As I drove to work today I was struck by a blast of irony. First, I drove in a teeny green car owned by Bob Laliberte, the largest person in Massachusetts, as he borrowed my giant pickup truck that I clearly don't belong in, ever. On the way, I found myself freezing to death, miserable, sick of the 9 degree winter when all of the sudden, a little Bob Marley comes on the radio, and darn if I didn't just feel better. I think I actually felt warmer.

For 50 years as an IT society, the "value" created by industry has always been based around – more, or bigger. Bigger boxes, bigger switches, bigger servers. More capacity, more ports, more users, more everything. It took until now to realize that more is no longer valuable – that the exact opposite is now where the value lies.

So, regardless of why, we now realize that unless its money – more sucks. Less is way better than more. It's interesting if you think about the potential ramifications of this concept across a industry built on the exact opposite principals. Technologies such as server virtualization or data de-duplication or WAN optimization are modern examples of big value creators – and all of them are about making LESS. Fewer servers, less storage, less bandwidth. Thus, assuming the value shift is proper (of course it is), then if your business model is predicated on MORE – you are screwed, eventually. People are now paying MORE money, and driving more market value by selling LESS. Brilliant.