Postcards from Storageland: Pure Storage Cancels Christmas

Ho ho ho folks. It’s nearly Christmas Day, 2016 and it most definitely is the season to be jolly. It’s also an exciting time in the All Flash Array industry with NetApp announcing its intended acquisition of Solidfire for a reported $870 million. Merry Christmas to everyone at Solidfire!

Unfortunately those sentiments weren’t shared by Pure Storage’s VP of Product, Matt Kixmoeller, who published a blog on the subject of the acquisition which seemed a little on the bitter side. A number of commentators on Twitter agreed:

This was an unusual slip of the mask for Pure Storage, who normally set the bar very high when it comes to marketing and PR. I don’t know for sure but I imagine that at some point after publication red lights and klaxons started flashing and blaring in the marketing division of Pure’s Mountain View head office. Within a short amount of time the blog post had been rewritten and republished with a suitably humbling note from Mr Kixmoeller:

I have to admit I struggle with the use of the word “feedback” here when “criticism” would clearly be more accurate… but I don’t want to turn this post into my own vendor-bashing exercise. I do however think it’s a very interesting opportunity to examine the workings of a marketing department. So here – purely for your edification – are the two versions of the article published so far (courtesy of the Internet Wayback Machine):

NetApp Acquires SolidFire – Flash Strategy Take 5 [initial version published 21 Dec 2015]

NetApp Acquires SolidFire – Flash Strategy Take 5 [revised version published 22 Dec 2015]

And here, to make it easy to consume, is a marked up version of the original document with changes in red. There are quite a lot of them! (Click on the image to see a larger version)

Merry Christmas everybody!

[Thanks to the Copyscape Compare tool for making this exercise easier…]