Ageed that EMC should not become arrogant (Ruetggers & Co. are certainly showing increasing signs of this). Arrogance leads to complacency and look what happened to IBM's market share in storage over the last eight years, when EMC itself was just a bug.
The point I think is that it is becoming increasingly more difficult to displace a gorilla, especially when the gorilla is so strategically located, such as in network systems, enterprise storage systems, or operating system software. Being the king PC vendor is not what I would call undisplacable location. Whereas EMC was able to displace IBM, I do not hink it would be as easy for another upstart to displace EMC in today's environment, especially with the technological lead EMC currently enjoys, its focus, its R&D, and its hold on Fortune 500 companies. Projections of storage needs over the next five years would seem to indicate that whoever dominates this particularly important period of exponential period is likely to sustain the leadership for some time to come, and EMC is indeed the best positioned.
This is not to rule out the possibility that a much smaller company can do very well, possibly better than EMC in relation to size. The question is how do you pick one that will succeed versus the many that will fail? Is it not a safer bet to go with an established leader whose management continues to perform top-knotch that can produce almost near certainties than gamble on some possibilities?
With technology, one must always be open to swift changes, particularly paradigm shifts. There will be a major paradigm shift in the storage area sometime, and EMC will someday begin to lose its market share. However, I don't see this happening during the next five criticl years. Even if a company comes out with a revolutionary solution, clients are not going to take risks on something untested for critical areas.
Erwin |
