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You cannot have failed to notice EMC's hiring assault on the blogosphere; especially anyone who is blogging on the wonderful world of V. It seems that EMC are aiming to get hold of some of the top talent and who can blame them? But apart from bolstering their technical resource, what else are they up to?

I wonder if some of Chuck's recent blogs give us some insight into what EMC are up to? If you strip away the EMC related rhetoric, you really end up with a compelling vision of a service oriented view of IT. There is actually very little to disagree with; even you if don't really believe in the Cloud; much of what Chuck's blog espouses what many of us have been trying to work too for years. 

So why the hiring spree? Well another common theme in Chuck's blog is that the technology to enable this change is really here and there is nothing stopping us embracing this apart from our own prejudices, either corporate or personal. It is simply a matter of psychology.
Although, the real life situation is more complex than this; there is more than a grain of truth in this. 

And I suspect EMC is actually no different; yes, EMC have some people with vision and a real desire for change but is this as prevalent as Chuck would like us to believe? My experience would suggest that EMC is changing but not as fast as people like Chuck want/need it to.
So what better idea than to hire in people who have already embraced the vision; dot them throughout the organisation and enable them to be change-bringers.

 The blogosphere is full of people with this vision and this is another example of EMC grasping social media and turning it to their advantage; also, think of the money that they are saving? Recruitment is an expensive game; by careful targeting, EMC are saving themselves a whole bunch of money.

 I hope this doesn't impact some of the excellent independent voices that we have but I can only applaud EMC for their boldness and congratulate those new hires on their new jobs.

Whilst catching up on the various blogs this week; especially in the aftermath of EMC's FAST announcement, something began to get to me. The number of competitor blogs who were obsessed with commenting on EMC's announcement even to the extent that they barely mention their own products.

I've now developed a rule:- as the number of times that a competitor's product is mentioned increases, the useful information contained in the article decreases in proportion. And if you rant on about a competitor's product and then get to the last paragraph and say something along the lines but I really don't understand the competitor's product…you have just made yourself look like a prize pillock!

So in future, it may actually be of more value to not comment on a competitor's announcement/product; instead of spending all that energy/creativity on that…perhaps write something positive or interesting about your own product. 

And can we please have #twitpiss truce!? For next three weeks, if you can't think of anything nice to say….say nothing!

You see a fair bit of discussion around Google Wave, some people thinking it'll be Google's first big failure and others very postive about it. Now I think it could be Google's first really big high profile failure for the simple reason although it has lots of potential, it has no real obvious killer application at present. And it's hard to see the value of it immediately.

Actually looking at Google Wave, this is one of the first times that Google have actually tried to invent something and get a new concept across; well, certainly one which is new to a lot of people (I worked on similar products for a small start-up many moons ago). Google are very good at taking existing ideas and making them better, these ideas though are nearly always pretty much fully accepted already tho'. Google do not invent, they improve.

There were search engines before Google; Google just did it better.

There was online advertising before Google, Google just does it better and knows how to monetise it better.

There was webmail before Gmail, Google just does it very well.

There's nothing wrong with this approach, arguably some countries have pretty much made this their whole industry. But to truly innovate, now that's hard and all the PhD's in the world are not necessarily going to generate the creative spark needed. 

This is equally true across the whole of the technical landscape and it might not matter whether you invented a concept, you just have to do it better. So whether EMC is more innovative than NetApp or whether IBM have more patents than HDS; it does not really matter from a customer's point of view. I just want products which do want I want them to do at a price which I want to pay. 

I see lots of cool products from lots of cool companies but cool is not a feature that I am willing to pay for in professional life (personally, I'll buy cool stuff all the time but I'm not going to bet my career on cool).

p.s Happy Turkey Day to my colonial readers! Remember to buy lots of cool stuff on Black Friday!

p.p.s I do have some spare invites for Google Wave if you want to give it a go.

Every now and then I rail against vendor FUD; especially in the Blogosphere, nobody especially listens and although there is sometimes a temporary lull, everyone soon goes back to their bad ways. So I thought I'd give an end-user's point of view and why it is a bad thing.

FUD is rarely backed-up with any kind of evidence; if you are going to criticise another vendor, you need to provide empirical evidence.

FUD often is couched in the terms 'it doesn't work'! Well, this is often plainly stupid; I find it hard to believe that any large vendor would ship a product which does not work! It may not meet all of it's claims but a plain 'it doesn't work'; that's madness!

If you are going to FUD product, you need to provide details and evidence. You should do it in a public forum and you should allow your competitors to respond. I don't mind competitive analysis and positioning of your product in the best possible light but please be willing to back up your statements.

Without such details, I simply treat it with the disdain it deserves!! I encourage all end-users to ask for details when presented with FUD. Ask for facts and figures; full disclosure and preferably not under NDA! 

FUD is often based on old information; competitors very rarely have information on each other's latest and greatest, so you find yourself comparing to last year's model and often features that were missing are now present. Immediately this makes me doubt your presentation because it is wrong!

Assume that the people you are presenting to are better aware of your competitor's products than you are; they've probably had the NDA presentations and know the roadmaps. And never allow yourself to be drawn into an argument about whether a feature is or isn't present in a competitor's product; invariably, you are wrong!

FUD may be fun but it often damages you more than the intended target!