Up and to the Right

Dear Established Storage World,

I’ve got some serious issues with what you’re assuming consumers and SMBs want from their storage. Get your head out of the “cloud” and listen up. Here’s what people actually want:

1. Don’t f#cking crash and lose my family photos or tax returns.
2. See number one.

Why is it then that when you look at how vendors such as HP, Iomega or LaCie market their storage products, they either 1) promote a bunch of technical specifications that are 100% irrelevant to customers or 2) promote a bunch of esoteric NAS features that are only good for Alpha Geeks? Who the hell cares how much RAM or what MHz processor is in a storage product? Is 1GHz good or bad for storage? Have you ever tried using UPnP / DLNA? It blows!

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t have any problems with NAS per se. To me NAS is a great way of sharing storage/files across many computers. I use NAS (via SMB/CIFS) at home every day with a Drobo and DroboShare for the three Macs in my apartment. Here’s my problem: most storage vendors conflate NAS with multimedia streaming and “cloud” services, but this approach is bound to fail. NAS is first and foremost a way of sharing files, not streaming them.

FACT: Windows Home Server (WHS) is bound to fail, just as surely as Intel’s Viiv platform for the living room is now a laughable and faded memory. Why? It’s a freaking mule that doesn’t know whether it wants to backup your data or make sweet love to your TV.

Windows Home Server will never match the beauty or elegance of either 1)  backing up to a direct-attached USB/FW/eSATA drive or 2) me walking up to my plasma screen TV and plugging my laptop in via HDMI–no need to convert videos between arcane codecs, download tons of buggy software or go through the headache of streaming. Intel’s Viiv failed because it’s really hard to put a general purpose computing device in the living room and have it do anything really well. WHS suffers from this same basic and fatal flaw. It’s really hard to put a general purpose storage device in the living room and have it do anything really well.

Sheer madness! Number of people who actually use this feature? Five? Ten?

At the end of the day WHS and most NAS devices fail my most basic of consumer/SMB litmus tests: I can’t explain what they do in one sentence or less. If you need further proof of their lack of consumer appeal, simply visit HP’s Home Media Server website. The first thing you’ll notice is a page about “Why a Home Server?” Um, if you need to have that page, you should realize you are selling a solution and technology in need of a problem.

"Redmond, we have a problem. No one wants these things."

How about this for a novel approach: we start with the needs of consumers and SMBs first? It’s what I did at Data Robotics (and they will continue to do) and we took the industry by storm. Here’s a cheat sheet for the Established Storage World , please refer to the beginning of this blog entry for what people want from their storage. Hint: it doesn’t have the words “Cloud 2.0.1″ in it.