1.021: bass-ackwards marketing

A coworker sent me this link a while back with a suggestion that I might want to use it in my blog. At the time, I really had no idea what to do with it, but now I think I do.

First, the link. Go ahead - click it, then come back.

That's a prime example of bass-ackwards marketing, if you'll excuse the pun. I mean really, who'd ever market anything as a "Real P.O.S." - even if it actually IS a POS?

Over the last several weeks, we've been witness to what could just be the biggest bass-ackwards marketing move ever. Who would have thought that IBM would stealth launch the GA of exciting new products like the first IBM-branded XIV Storage System, the brand-new DS5000 Storage System and a whole suite of DS8000 enhancements? And then, amidst the ruckus that Chuck and I seem to have started filling the void created by IBM's marketing department, IBM puts on a full-court press push to promote a science experiment using NAND flash behind an unsupported configuration of SVC nodes - a configuration that they publicly admit won't be available to customers for at least 9-12 months. Complete with IBM blogger air cover from BarryW and from TonyP. Meanwhile both  remain deathly silent about everything else.

Promote the stuff you can't buy yet, and say nothing about the new stuff that you CAN buy.

Seems so...Alice-in-Wonderlandish, doesn't it?

Now, if I'm reading the tea-leaves (and TonyP's intentional hint) correctly, the press is supposed to take the Blue Pill and show up at the System and Storage Networking Technical Symposium on September 8-10 in Montpelier, France to get the scoop on all this, and more. And the press seems to have calmed down once they received their invitations (mine must have gotten lost in the mail).

Curiouser and curiouser, IBM's marketing team has even co-opted "Information Infrastructure" - a term near-synonymous with EMC - for the title of their Symposium, calling it the "New Enterprise Forum: Information Infrastructure."

Thanks for the plug!

UPDATE 4:45pm EDT Sept 3, 2008: Changed above link to search for the possessive complete string "EMC Information Infrastructure" - returns about 25,200 Google hits, while "IBM Information Infrastructure" returns merely 7,120-ish hits.

technorati tags: IBM, XIV, DS8000, DS5000, EMC Information Infrastructure, bass ackwards

Comments

[Ewan]

The IBM non-launches of XIV and the DS5000 are strange to say the least, but I can't see how "Information Infrastructure" is synonymous with EMC.

The google search you link to returns " Results 31 - 40 of about 439,000 for EMC information infrastructure."

Change the word EMC for IBM, and the results rise to "Results 1 - 10 of about 579,000 for ibm information infrastructure."

[Chris]

Google search hits:

ibm information infrastructure - ~563,000 hits

EMC information infrastructure - ~431,000 hits

I guess IBM owns that one then!

[the storage anarchist]

Gents - if the VOLUME of hits were sufficient to define ownership, then it'd be pretty easy to steal anyone's trademarks.

Let's try measuring by first use. So far, the earliest use I can find for either company in formal communication is EMC's 8-K on EDGAR Online. Chuck Hollis used the term on his Blog in 2005. And the earliest IBM reference I've found so far is 2006.

Open challenge- let's see how far back we can go!

[Barry Whyte]

Any advance on Nov 2001 :

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1015.wss

How about 1990 :

http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/projects/hii/

But then maybe nobody needs to "own it" :

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=623833