EMC Makes Nice
Gosh, I hope they didn’t sprain anything in the process . . .
I just got a nice note from an EMC representative.
Hello Robin,
We’ve been regular readers of StorageMojo for quite a while and welcome the efforts of you and others in the blogosphere to facilitate open dialogue and provide feedback about our industry. As you correctly point out, pricing information is publicly available on EMC’s website. For our part, we have no desire to hide this information - which is why it is posted. You are obviously free to post any information that we publicly make available, and if the information you posted falls into that category, our letter to you was unwarranted. Hopefully your readers can appreciate the importance of protecting intellectual property and trade secrets in a highly competitive industry. That is all that our lawyers were attempting to do.
Best Regards,
Michael Gallant
Senior Director, EMC Public Relations
Well, that’s a load off my mind . . .
I spent way too many years working in big corporations, and I’m well aware of the “right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing” problem. I hold no grudge against the lawyer. I’m confident he wasn’t out surfing the web looking for contraband IP when he saw StorageMojo.
I smell a rat
The guy who ratted out StorageMojo, however, is a jerk. I don’t believe that a rank & file EMC’er stumbled upon the price list and got a lawyer to dash off a cease & desist letter? I believe it took some clout along with poor judgement. EMC doesn’t need people like him.
The StorageMojo take
Even though Mr Gallant’s note refrains from saying I am out of the woods - a nice lawyerly touch, wouldn’t want to foreclose any options - my take is that this is as close to an apology I’m going to get. And I’ll take it as such.
As I noted in my last post:
. . . I have no problem with EMC defending its trade secrets. One reason I don’t sign NDAs with companies that aren’t clients is that I don’t want to be . . . possibly revealing someone’s trade secrets. I prefer to look at publicly available information and to draw my own conclusions.
EMC is a large and powerful company. As Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben used to say, “with great power comes great responsibility.” IMHO that power was used a tad precipitately, and I’m glad EMC responded as quickly as it has.
Comments welcome, as always. And special thanks to all who wrote or called to express support. It meant a lot. Moderation is a virtue except in the defense of liberty.
on March 30th, 2007 at 3:35 am
Law and the way some people think you can mis use it is a strange phenomena.
nevertheless good to see some apologies coming from someone with feeling for PR.
Emc is large but as dependent of it’s customers like small firms. Building a good name takes you years, getting a bad name can take days .
on April 12th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
the prices are supposed to be a black box, just like the hardware. let’s say a drive fails in your DMX3000: a technician is sent out to replace the drive but, the technician sent to your site is apparently not qualified to do the work. they have to call some help desk to request that an administrator at the other end of the phone remotely access the DMX to run the script to allow the drive to be swapped. considering how stupid that is, i am not surprised to find that the right hand does not know what the left is doing.