The estimable Guy Kawasaki will be presenting a free webcast tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific focusing on how to evangelize your product or service. Although his work after Apple hasn’t been as high profile, I feel that he is a person that we all ought to pay attention to!
Robin Harris blogged today about Google’s pay-for-storage service, and he hit the nail on the head. It (and pretty much every other current online storage service) is nearly worthless to most folks because it lacks one simple thing: A usable interface. Set aside Google’s traditionally horrid (lack of) marketing and you’re left with a service that’s sure to confound everyone. But Microsoft’s recently unveiled SkyDrive isn’t any better… Read on for my take on these services and what they should offer.
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I guess I kind of touched Jon Toigo nerve when I said he was “promoting himself”. Sounds like he took offense to the term, but perhaps he shouldn’t have!
Let me give you some background, gentle reader… I’ve never worked for a “product company” in the storage industry, I’m a services guy. And services are all about selling people - their skills and their time. So rather than promoting a new box or piece of software, we in the services business promote ourselves, which I personally feel is the most honest thing to promote! After all, we each have different skills - all we services companies can do is try to distill a similar set of skills to offer and hope that people are interested.
And, frankly, we all engage in self-promotion every time we blog (as a verb). Blogging is all about rising above the crowd and saying “my opinion is important.” Unlike traditional media, however, it is democratic: Anyone can blog, anyone can try to be important, and the world will judge just how important they are.
Perhaps this is why people find corporate marketing blogs (aka blogketing) to be so insidious. They are, seemingly, not the acts of individual initiative but of organizational co-option and perhaps even surreptition. We feel that they are somehow less honest, since the person writing the words may be checking his true feelings at the door.
But perhaps not. I agree with Jon’s assertion that corporate blogs give us a little insight, even if it is packed in salt grains. And they certainly give us democratic communication - just like anyone can blog, anyone can comment, and blog writers (even the most corporate) tend to read their thoughts. Plus, as Beth Pariseau noted, the back and forth can be both enlightening and enjoyable to watch!
Blogket away, I say. Self-promote, too. It’s a post-modern world: I’ll figure out what your angle is…
It isn’t every day that a new hard disk technology is introduced, but Samsung recently did just that with the introduction of their SpinPoint MH80. This conventional looking SATA hard drive packs 256 MB of NAND flash memory alongside two conventional platters totaling 160 GB of traditional magnetic storage. Tellingly, it’s a 2.5” laptop drive with only 8 MB of cache.
This on board flash memory is what makes the drive a hybrid. If you listen to the marketing spin, you would think that this drive would dramatically improve response time and battery life, but a thorough review over at Tom’s Hardware shows that this isn’t the case, even for a laptop running Microsoft’s Windows Vista.
Vista is the only operating system that’s currently capable of taking advantage of the flash memory in a hybrid drive. See, these drives contain an extended version of the serial ATA command set which allows the host to direct I/O to either the flash or the magnetic platter – the drive doesn’t do it on its own.
So hybrid drives are more of a packaging exercise that a real technology improvement. They simply allow operating system to access flash memory and use it as it sees fit. While I’m certain that other operating systems, especially Linux, will quickly support this flash memory, I’m much more dubious about the long-term impact on it. Intel has their own specification for adding flash memory to an x86 motherboard called Turbo Memory (code name Robson) which is already gaining traction with many OEMs, including Apple! In practice, hybrid drives are just alternative to Robson.
So what will be the impact of hybrid drives on the world of enterprise storage? Probably very little, at least for the time being. Tests of Microsoft’s ReadyBoost technology have shown the practical impact of flash memory of operating system is small. Solid state disk technology is unlikely to gain widespread use without some real performance improvements to report, and if it ever does it would probably be implemented very differently than the current crop of hyper drives, or Intel’s Rob son for that matter. So hybrid drives are here, but no one cares.
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