Vendor Blogger Survey

After watching twitter for a bit, I noted that it seemed to me that some vendor folks are very anti-competitor rather than pro-own-company.

This is tiresome. Anything any vendor employee says about a competitor is automatically viewed with suspicion and isn't believed. There have been some quite aggressive tactics recently, smearing competitors doesn't make it likely we'll want to do business with you.

An example of the right attitude came from one of our supplier account managers. He was in an rfp against another supplier when news came out that the competitors kit had had a high profile public failure. We asked him to comment, perhaps expecting some crowing or spin. The response along the lines of "Thank god it wasn't one of ours, it happens to all of us".

Good answer.

Anyway, intrigued I looked at the last twenty posts from vendor employed storage bloggers and noted them as self (about vendor) or other (dissing the competition).

Results

EMC:

Chad Sakac (@sakacc): 20 self, 0 other
Chuck Hollis (@chuckhollis): 18 self, 2 other
Barry Burke (@storageanarchy): 15 self, 5 other

NetApp:

Val (@valb00): 18 self, 2 other
Alex McDonald (@alextangent): 10 self, 10 other

HP:

Marc Farley (@3parfarley): 16 self, 4 other
Calvin Zito (@hpstorageguy): 17 self, 3 other

IBM:

Barry Whyte (@barrywhyte ?): 16 self, 4 other

Oracle were 100% self, didn't catch the authors name though.

I'm on my phone at the moment, so no great conclusion, but there's my data...

Comments

[BrandonJRiley]

Interesting. What this says to me is that the negative attacks, although a lot less in number, carry a LOT more weight with social media followers.

Take note.

[Knieriemen]

Being in the channel, we are considered a customer to the vendor and a vendor to the customer so my opinion on this needs to be viewed within that context.

I think the vendor back-and-forth is good if the information is helpful in deciphering strengths and weaknesses of a solution. Just like an end-user, we get pounded by vendors trying to build a channel for their products. When we evaluate vendors, we can do all the testing possible, read all the best practices and get fully trained on the solution... but what we can't judge easily is how they actually perform in the field, how much real traction their technology has, how their support organization functions and (sometimes) what their reputation is.

I like to hear the good and the bad of the vendors in our industry and I think much of the back and forth is necessary and healthy. Constructive criticisms should ALWAYS be welcome. However, ad hominem attacks between vendors are completely unnecessary.

[Storagemartin]

Brandon - I agree, although social media is a bit of an echo chamber, I'm not sure many people notice outside twitter until something is blogged, and many don't notice blogs until a news site picks up the story, etc.

Knieriemen - thanks, I agree somewhat, in that stories from customers have value to customers, stories from resellers have value to resellers, stories from vendors about other vendors, not so much I think. I'll actually follow up with another post around this I think, you got me thinking!

Thanks for the comments as well, my first blogging effort, so it's appreciated that you're taking the time.

[Chad Sakac]

Disclosure - I'm an EMCer.

For what it's worth, I'm always TRYING (and often failing) to stay above the fray. It's crazy hard. We're all dialed up so that relatively innocuous comments (and twitter exacerbates this with very little context to 140-char tweets) get us all frothing furiously.

I think that storage is an area where the competition is particularly fierce because for whatever reason, there are pretty substantial architectural differences between platforms (think of the comparisons to servers) - making rational, direct comparisons very, very hard.

I also think that Social Media is a bit of an echo chamber (again, twitter particularly). Personally, I get much more value, and much healthier multi-dimensional feedback on my blog (and most of all in dialog with customers).

Just my 2 cents.

Thanks for the post!