StorageMojo NPI
New Product Introduction
As part of my campaign to increase the world’s consumption of disk capacity - see yesterday’s post - I’ve developed a new capacity gobbling product. For lack of a better term I call it a video white paper.
The impetus? No one reads anymore. Especially white papers. We’d much rather watch videos.
Enter Gear6
When I looked around for a launch customer, Gear6 came to mind. Their marketing VP, Gary Orenstein, has one of the few marketing blogs, Thoughtput with real content instead of “aren’t we wonderful” happy talk. He’s done a number of podcasts as well. He’s a new-media, large file size kind of guy.
Happily, he agreed to be the launch customer.
Here’s your part
Gear6 and Gary responded favorably to this new product and now I would like to hear from all of you. I am continuing to enhance the concept with the goal of bringing more value to everyone that views it.
What’d I’d like you to do is to watch the 4.5 minute video and tell me what you think. What works, what doesn’t work. What you’d like to see more of and what you’d like to see less of.
Meet Nisha Talagala, CTO
Nisha is not just really smart - smarter than the average Silicon Valley CTO - she is also a very nice person. I was impressed.
Yes, I was paid for this. And I’d like to be paid to do more of them! But only if they are worthwhile for you. So help me figure out how to make that happen.
Comments welcome - more than ever. My goal is to create something that is genuinely useful for information seekers in a 3-5 minute package. Tell me how well you think it works. How would *you* get more valuable content into 3-5 minutes in a way that people will watch?
Update: I tweaked the wording a bit. Same video.
on October 29th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
I beg to differ: *I* read white papers, and I’d read a lot more (as I used to) if they didn’t require some kind of silly registration (hey, if companies want people to read their spin, placing irritating obstacles in the way of doing so is *not* the best way to go about it).
But perhaps I’m not a great example of the audience that you’re targeting, since I’d rather have the opportunity to analyze hard technical data about a product than listen to someone (whether you or some CTO) babble on about how wonderful it is (not to denigrate Gear6’s product: it’s probably as useful in some circumstances - and as useless in others - as the good old PrestoServe product which is its logical single-system ancestor, since some workloads respond well to caching and others benefit not at all from it and instead require actual performance at the disk level, contradicting the suggestion that this product necessarily decouples performance and capacity).
Give me back my free-to-download-without-registering white papers and I’ll happily ignore your cheerful but content-poor videos (not to suggest that a certain clientele won’t gobble them up like jelly beans, of course: substance is not everyone’s cup of tea). But I’ll still enjoy longer presentations with real technical content - e.g., some of the long videos with Q&A that the ZFS implementors released.
Well, you did ask for comment. As to your final question, I suspect that there’s *no* way to get really valuable content into a 3 - 5 minute video, almost as little as there is to get it into a 30-second campaign commercial. But don’t let that stand in your way: I’m sure there’s a way to *sell* such a vehicle, meager in actual value though it may be.
- bill
on October 30th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
YouTube is blocked by our corporate web nanny filters, so I can’t offer an opinion on the content of your first video.
In general, good videos are a complement to good writing, but should not replace writing. Bad videos are an infuriating waste of time. At least with writing, I can scan for the hidden gems, if the topic is sufficiently interesting.
on October 31st, 2007 at 9:19 am
Robin,
A good show….but the tour of hardware was somewhat brief….I guess it is very expensive to hold inventory.
I still have a problem with the concept.
I understand how data is cached on writes and how reads can be easily re-directed to cache. But…perhaps Nisha could explain what happens on ‘reads’ when the data is not in cache.
In particular, what happens when (say) there are multiple sequential video streams and the data needs to be pre-fetched ( i.e. read-ahead from disks )to enable uninterrupted streaming…?
on November 6th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Robin,
Good Job! I think the video clips bring a real human element to the technology…something that has been missing. You asked for feedback and I think the only thing I would change would be the walking/talking segment at the end. You need rails and a grip for that! Check out http://www.sellingpower.com/video/, they have a neat video daily feature but it is not any more professional than yours. Your off to a good start.
Dale
on November 19th, 2007 at 4:17 am
Hi Robin,
I found it very helpful, reading spec sheets and analysis is allvery well, hearing the sales pitch is completely different. It was also helpful to get a feel for the CTO as a person, she’s the key to how the product develops in the future and again it’s something you jsut don’t get from a static web page.
I hope you do more of them. Could we have Lefthand and Caringo next please?