All Posts in “vSpecialist”

Network Television mirrors IT Technology Cycles


There were 2 maybe 3 Golden ages of network television. The first was the initial couple of years that TV existed with shows like the Honeymooners and I love Lucy. The second came in the 70’s – 80’s with shows like the Love Boat, Knight Rider, and the A-Team (plus sweet cartoons like GI-Joe, Transformers, and Thunder Cats). I digress; the third Golden Age was 1989 – 2000 with shows like Seinfeld and Friends netting the networks loads of money. The thing that broke up the golden ages were disruptive technologies. While I wasn’t alive for the first golden age I certainly saw the episodes in re-runs and I saw the second golden age end because of cable networks and the third one come to an end because of better programming on those same cable networks.

Anti-FUD Campaign

Remember the movie Miracle on 34th St? For those of you who live under a rock the movie is about a little girl and her mother meeting the real Santa Claus. Santa for reasons still somewhat unclear went to work at Macy’s during his short offseason between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and did something crazy, he told customers where they could find specific toys for their kids at the competition. At first Mr. Macy was beside himself until he realized that the method built life long customers out of those who heard about it. In the movie the idea was more about the Christmas spirit than smart advertising, but in reality this method works really well. Take for example Progressive insurance who shows customers competitive pricing, before doing so they had annual sales of $3.4 billion and since implementing this tactic now have annual sales of $15 billion.  Amazon uses similar tactics, that’s why they sell advertising to their competition. [1] In our industry even VMware uses this technique in vCAC integrated ITBM to show you what your cloud costs would be for AWS, Azure and vCHS.

What’s in a name?

Let’s start off with a disclaimer: this blog is mine, opinions are my own. I work for EMC but these views and words are all mine. This isn’t the corporate line being towed.

Others have written about the Federation and how it works, they have touched on the co-opetition that exists between the companies.
So why do I feel compelled to write on it?

Well in part because I really don’t know how to keep my mouth shut. Also because just perhaps I have a slightly different view being new to this perspective. So without further ado: