It is pretty much just you. The rest of us (all two of us) in Data Mobility Group think your NDA position is, in a word, dumb, though we still love you anyway, and as you noted, the EMC Analyst Days event was well attended (would it be violating my NDA to disclose that EMC didn’t have enough chairs the first day, so many attendees had to sit on metal chairs that threatened to cause permanent disabilities?).

It strikes me as odd that you would rather go to a NetApp event where you are guaranteed not to hear anything but on-message, for-public-consumption marketing presentations than to the EMC event where it was at least possible that you might glean some information that you couldn’t get from reading the company’s web site.

Honestly, there was hardly anything revealed at EMC Analyst Days that would surprise anyone. I think EMC could email all the presentations directly to their competitors and it would have little to no adverse impact on EMC and be of little to no benefit to the competitors. There were a few things that EMC plans to announce at EMC World that they announced to the analysts, six weeks ahead of time, but I suppose they could have just relied on the standard “gentleman’s embargo” instead of requiring a signed NDA for that stuff.
However, there were a few factoids and opinions that came up in the Q & A and G & T (give and take) that the EMC folks might not have shared had they not had the NDAs in place.

It’s interesting that you decided to lump the NDA dig in with the dig about EMC PhDs (I don’t see any common theme other than it being take-a-swipe-at-EMC day). If you had attended the EMC Analyst Days, you could have participated in a quite candid discussion with Jeff Nick (he’d probably call it a grilling) that included, among other things, the issue of EMC’s visibility / mindshare / participation in the IT “thought-o-sphere” (I just made that word up because I couldn’t think of an actually good way to say what I meant). I have several thoughts about your comments on EMC’s t-o-s performance (I both agree and disagree), but this comment is already over-long, so I’ll save them for later.

BFF,
Walter

(I guess maybe we should ask people to sign an NDA before letting them read these “internal” Data Mobility Group debates — you think?)

Looks like I’m just going to have to blog about it.

You are correct. I’m not getting a lot of love from EMC, except for the hottie in marcom. For all their bravado they can be such wimps, fearful of engaging with critics. What they don’t get is that I’d like to see them do well.

Maybe sending all their exec’s to Karl Rove’s “George W. Bush School of Leadership” wasn’t such a great investment.

Now-I-must-go-and-buy-many-EqualLogic-thingies. . . .

Chris,

They be hatin’ on you, man.

Or it could be that they treat analysts differently than they do IT consultants. Were you at the NYC analyst meeting? It was a good event and it improved my take on NetApp.

Robin

There must be a reason they pad their papers with non-subliminal adverts. Maybe it’s because it works. I hate to think that we (humans) are at the level, but sometimes you just have to wonder. Oh yes, unless I forget, buy EqualLogic products.

I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with on this topic.

That seemed unnecessarily short, so I sent Mark Twomey,, an EMC Senior Solutions Engineer based in Ireland, a note with the header: What’s the magic word?

So he sent me back two notes:
-The first with a one word reply: “Dork?”
-The second said:
“And as I put in my post, just sign the bloody NDA at least then you’ll
have a frame of reference to complain from. ;-p”

The kicker: the post I referenced isn’t on the new site. I couldn’t change the link if I wanted to.

Mark, I predict you have a great future ahead of you at EMC.

Robin