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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Seldom_Blue who wrote (37761)	1/11/2001 6:56:28 AM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

the IP needs to be the barrier to entry, not simply to give them the price/performance advantage NTAP's IP is the bte. It's IP is the underlying technology to its p/p advantage, and the patents protect others from using that technology. I do see your point, however. You think of IP as a standard that others mush comply with in order to deliver products, so they must buy licenses for its use. That model is too restrictive, imo. Using a ridiculous example, if you owned the IP for the wheel, you would be able to build the best performing donkey cart in the world. Only you could produce it. The only way around that barrier would be for someone to invent a device more efficent than your wheel. In the meantime, others would be building material transporting devices that look a lot like your carts, but theirs would be sitting on top of poles that slid along the ground. They would hook three donkies up to their devices and racing your one donky cart and claiming that their device was faster and more reliable than yours. After all, they have redundant donkies! What you must realize is that WAFL is simply the most efficient way ever concieved of writing and reading RAID protected data on a rotating storage device. No one has conceived of a better method. As one of our occasional contributors and frequent lurkers pointed out to me recently, when storage media of a different, revolutionary design begins to replace rotating storage, WAFL will probably lose its p/p advantage. But, rotating storage has been dominant since the late 1960's when it replaced magnetic tape as the preferred method of online mass storage. Could someone design an open/proprietary file system that would be disruptive to WAFL? Sure, but they haven't yet, so WAFL is the disruptive innovation that NTAP has used to build its gorilla-ness. DAFS/VI may turn out to be the kind of IP that fits your paradigm. I am not sure what level of control the ORCA purchase has given NTAP. At the very least, DAFS/VI will uniquely take advantage of the p/p that WAFL provides to create very fast, scalable, cheap, open/proprietary storage. Now for the audience's vote.