A) It’s free

B) It’s not my “most private data.” My most private data fits comfortably and cheaply in my pocket/safe-deposit box.

The only way EMC’s consumer products are going to gain any traction is though an agreement with a large cable operator or a pushing the product into a mega-retailer like Walmart. The cable providers are too fiscally responsible (cheap) to offer an EMC product.

I doubt EMC will push product into mega-retailer, they don’t have the support infrastructure for the business model and I doubt they will accept making $3/unit sold.

I would love to be a fly on the wall in the Walmart meeting:

WMRT: Will make 24% margins on all your products and service.
EMC: Huh,,, OK ??
WMRT: You WILL pay us a 3% slot fee (floor space).
EMC: Huh, what’s that??
WMRT: You WILL will advertise so we can sell 10000 units a month.
EMC: Huh, OK ??
WMRT: Walmart will pay you net 90 as units sell.
EMC: Huh, isn’t that “consignment” ??
WMRT: We will set your retail pricing at $49.95.
EMC: But, we just break even at that price.
WMRT: If you don’t like the price, we can get the same thing from China for the price we want.
EMC: Huh ?
WMRT: Thanks for supplying Walmart, you can get a cold sandwiches in the vending machine down the hall (lunch).

Welcome to the real world…

Symmetrix (which did qualify as innovative – in the early ’90s) is getting really, really old, Clariion (purchased technology) likewise, Celerra began life as a DEC advanced-development project and was rather ham-handedly morphed into the relatively uninspiring product that it is today, Centera is a mediocre implementation of (once again) acquired technology (one has to wonder whether it or Celerra would have survived without the pull of EMC’s established base), RSA, VMware, various backup and document products, and perhaps Rainfinity (which I’m not familiar with) are more inspiring but (yet again) acquired rather than home-grown: EMC’s entire history since Symmetrix has seemed to consist of holding onto the leadership that it established well over a decade ago, trying not to screw up the technology that it has since purchased, and desperately attempting to make that hodge-podge of products look like something integrated (though to be fair it has enjoyed significant success in these endeavors: they just don’t qualify as innovative).

It’s not that EMC doesn’t *try* to innovate: it just doesn’t seem to understand how to do so effectively (though often manages to bury its failures quietly enough not to be embarrassed by them). Perhaps there’s something in the corporate culture/management that resists the kind of creativity that true innovation requires; whatever the reason, the new consumer-product initiatives that it seems to be planning make me wonder if its management has gone completely off the rails (and it brings back sad memories of the days when DEC was flailing about doing similarly silly things).

So I’m not holding my breath waiting for Maui, because I see no reason to expect its technology to be in any way ‘industry-leading’ (if you have actual information that would suggest otherwise, it would be nice to see it presented) – which is not to say that EMC won’t succeed in selling it, of course. That’s too bad, because as the most storage-centric vendor around EMC *could* (and arguably *should*) be an innovative leader in a field that sure could use one.

- bill