Self-Censorship and EMC Marketing

One of the things I was looking forward to in this blog was the opportunity to get down and dirty with some of the technology I am very familiar with.

I was hoping to discuss the limitations of what our system could do because that would be interesting to our customers, and I suspect the storage industry at large.

But discussing limitations is dangerous. Someone can misquote you and turn what is a nuanced argument into prima-facie evidence that our system behaves in a particular way. To be able to have these discussions you need to assume that your opponents in the market place will play fair. In particular, you have to believe that they will not take a sentence out of context and use it in a technical report that they will then distribute to your customers to spread misinformation.

Unfortunately for me, and for you, EMC's marketing seems to be specialists in the art of taking quotes out-of-context and using them to bludgeon competitors. Their latest assault on usable capacity is yet another example of that. And if that was an isolated example, maybe I could ignore what happened. But I can not. Over the past several years I have been personally involved in correcting disinformation spread by EMC using out-of-context quotes, out-of-date information and plain old fashioned half-truths.

I don't want to be drafting explanations, handling customer calls, and wasting a lot of my and sales and customer time to deal with EMC Marketing generated FUD.

And if you think it's paranoia, when I wrote Rethinking Deduplication, within a couple of days, I had NetApp field person complaining that EMC was using my blog to argue that NetApp was arguing that Dedup was not intended for primary storage. I was forced to write a new blog entry, Deduplication, it's not just about backup just to clarify what I was saying.

Look I don't know if Chuck's right about NetApp's marketing. He goes to great length to ridicule whatever we do. And he is a VP in marketing, and I am an engineer, so that makes him the expert, not me. Maybe EMC's marketing is the right way to go.

But I do know that this style of marketing has forced a considerable amount of self-censorship on this particular blog writer, and that sucks.

Comments

[Alex McDonald]

I feel the same way. Self-censorship makes it impossible to say much of anything for fear of an attack from the living dead.

EMC's marketing, for the blogging perspective, isn't the right way to go, btw; it's a lose-lose scenario.

A big dash of misrepresentation, a hyperinflation of claims, with some self-righteous indignant posturing about blogging ettiquette...

That, frankly, sucks. I can't do it.