Hi Gary,

Lee Johns from the HP StorageWorks team just posted a related blog that you can find here: www.communities.hp.com/.../what-constitutes-brave-new-thinking.aspx.  

I find it really interesting that EMC in particular sat on the sidelines for over two years and never once talked about the innovation from HP BladeSystem but now that they are partnering with Cisco are sudden fans of blade technology.  Hmmm - sounds a little self-serving to me but so is 90% of what their main blogger has to say.

This is, of course, exactly what teenagers do. Somewhere between the ages of 13 and 16 parents suddenly become stupid and silly, while teens wax both eloquent and wise. Then, almost as suddenly, perhaps around the age of 19 or 20 -- maybe sooner, if there has been in an automobile accident or other crisis -- parents suddenly seem smart again.

Another way of viewing it is through the lens of archetypes. This one is known as Shifting the Burden (c.f. www.systems-thinking.org/.../sb.htm). The competitor solution is almost always a symptomatic solution, arrived at by building their product to meet the whining needs they have heard about pertaining to the prevailing solution (in this case HP's). A customer buys our gear, complains about this or that irritation in our product (and all products have irritations, however minor), and then the competitor offers their solution as a quick fix for the particular irritation. The problem, of course, is that such irritations are almost always superficial -- and the prevailing solution usually has at least a workaround for the irritation. That is why it is the prevailing solution. Moreover -- speaking again in terms of the Shifting the Burden archetype -- the prevailing solution sometimes offers a fundamental solution to all the irritations. I am reminded about some of the irritations reported about Virtual Connect a few years back. Someone might have offered (and probably did offer) a storage or networking solution that was easier to set up and integrate into a particular infrastructure but which turned out not provide anything like the scalability or flexibility of Virtual Connect. The irritation of Virtual Connect, of course, always surrounded the need to think through the overall infrastructure and to configure Virtual Connect accordingly. Once the infrastructure problem was understood, the setup problem was almost always straightforward, but addressing proper infrastructure design is a thorny issue anywhere. Thus the proffered competitor solutions -- which were almost always symptomatic solutions that created new problems down the road. Meanwhile, Virtual Connect was already helping lots of customers to begin thinking seriously about their infrastructure design problesm, leading in due time to a fundamental solution. It's why those customers will never move away from BladeSystem (and Virtual Connect is only one example).