I love this industry. Every quarter, IDC publishes their scorecard of vendor market share rankings in the storage hardware and storage software biz.
Given that IDC has to figure this all pretty much on their own from published reports and other analysis, they do a pretty good job. As an example, EMC provides no explicit guidance to IDC other than publicly available information.
One background argument that’s been going on for years is defining the buckets that IDC uses. Naïve me, I thought the debate was about logical consistency and how customers actually thought about things. But I found out that there’s a huge chessboard here with vendors trying to redefine categories to their advantage.
Sheesh.
But what I truly enjoy is the flurry of “we’re the market leader” press announcements that come out shortly after IDC releases their information. If you like puzzles, read each of these releases and try to decode just how they had to torture the numbers and the language to make it look like they have some sort of claim to market leadership.
Imagine a room full of PR people. They’ve got the IDC numbers. They don’t look good. They’ve got 24 hours to get positive spin out. Better send out for some lipstick, this may take a while …
Do we emphasize revenue? Units? Capacity? Which makes us look best?
Jeez, my overall standings in those categories don’t look good, maybe we’ll go for the “fastest growth” against other vendors. Well, that doesn’t look so good, maybe we’ll compare against ourselves, especially if we’re comparing against a not-so-good previous period. Or, if all else fails, we’ll pick a niche and claim leadership.
Who says PR people don’t work hard? This is heavy lifting!
There’s a related trend that’s cut from the same cloth, the “independent survey”. Some of the industry publications have found that these are good ways to build mildly interesting content without a lot of effort. So they conduct their own surveys, using their own methodologies, bringing their own biases, and promote the results as they see fit.
Hey, I’ve got a background in statistics and modeling, so I tear my hair out when I see these things. And, if you’ve ever met me, you know there’s not a lot of hair left to tear out.
I think the most egregious examples are the “instant surveys”. It’s like American Idol, someone wins, but they probably weren’t the best performer, just the one that everyone voted for … and voted for … and voted for.
We all know it’s easy to construct a survey to get the answers you want. Obvious answers to obvious questions don’t make for good reading, so I sense that our friends in the publication business are looking for a bit of controversy.
I don’t know about you, but I’d like to see fewer, better constructed surveys, rather than dozens of one-offs that really don’t answer any questions.
Look, folks, I don’t think smart customers pay too much attention to all of this. Let’s spend our effort trying to help customers and build better solutions, rather than playing one-upsmanship on the numbers or some half-baked survey. OK, maybe I’m biased because EMC does pretty well in most of these things, but still …
I think the best solution was in pre-school, where we all got an award from the teacher. The nice thing is that we all felt special, and it really didn’t matter.
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