Why “Good Enough” is just not “Good Enough”…
Well, its on again. That old chestnut that just refuses to go away. Will MS sunset VMware? Will VMware become the next Novell? The tired old staple of many a blog post and pundit a like. You know why I get so tired of this argument?
Firstly, it’s so hampered by binary thinking. Yes, I know binary is important part of IT, but the problem with it is that stain can be felt on the way people in IT like to think. It’s Yes or No, its On or Off, its 1 or 0. It’s VMware or Microsoft. Thinking like this patently ignores any attempt at laterial thinking or business realities. Look at other aspects of IT where there is not just more than one vendors but a multitude. There is more than one OEM server vendor (Dell, HP, IBM), more than one storage vendor (NetApp, EMC, FalconStor, 3PAR, ad nauseum), more than one backup vendor (Symantec, Legato, CommVault). So why the hell can’t we have more than one virtualization vendor (VMware, MS, Citrix). Heck, some of us might actually think that more than one vendor is implicit GOOD thing – for both healthy competition and allowing customers to play one vendor against another. In the spirit of free-enterprise, I welcome the fact that VMware’s competitors products are maturing. My god, they started from such a low point, the only way is up.
What inspired this post was reading a blogpost on SearchServerVirtualization.com here:
http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid94_gci1364388,00.html
In the article – David Cappuccio, Research vice president, Gartner Research states that “Good enough’ always wins out in the long run.”. I’ve got news for David, he’s wrong. Dead wrong. More wronger than Gartner has been in a long time. Good enough will NOT do. I’ve had 16 years of experience of various products in IT, and tell you what I and the customer I work with, are sick to the back teeth of the “good enough” mentality that seems be riddle our industry. An industry where customers (essential business managers, who know jack about IT) select the “good enough” over the advice of their highly paid and experienced IT staffers. And you know what happens once they have selected the “good enough” solution, and then employed us to implement it? They scream out how useless it is and how its “just not good enough”.
[End Rant] My more consider point is this. If you buy a “just good enough” solution, it will always be that – “just good enough”. It will always fail and disappoint you. Until its replace with solution which actually works. What annoys me about this sort of “good enough” claptrap is that is so uninspired – rather than pushing outselves and our technology to moon, we should just settle for the horse cart – after all wasn’t that just “good enough”.
Finally, you must, must remember what is virtualization is – not matter how “commiditized” the Hypervisor becomes. This things RUNS your infrastructure. If it doesn’t work, you in the shit. And you good enough, won’t be good enough then.
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August 13th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
yeah. that sounds good enough. engineers should rule the world. oh yeah. they don’t. that’s good enough also.
August 13th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Most of the experts quoted in the article do agree with you, that there is room for VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. And in response to the “good enough” argument, you have to consider pricing. Sure, nobody would pick the “good enough” solution if it cost the same as the “ideal” solution. But that isn’t the case here.
Anyway, I’m glad our article could help spark this discussion. Thanks for reading!
August 13th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Yes, well I must say I was really venting in that blog post. Admittedly, mine is not a pragmatic viewpoint at all, but an ideological one against the “good enough” approach to technology. Increasingly the narrative coming out of MS is the cost and “tax” narrative. MS seem to have the same approach to VMware as they do Apple sometimes. There is much traffic on how expensive the VMware product is, but many would also subscribe to the “you get what you pay for…”, but exclusively focusing on cost, rather than added-value – then the debate is skewed by people not comparing like-with-like. Increasingly the MS solution and the VMware solution are being conflated and compared as if they cousins or equivalents. The truth is that despite MS late arrival of “Live Migrate” or “Cluster Volumes”, the debate about whether MS will eat up VMware’s market share can’t be boiled down to a component features. But if they were VMware is at least a decade ahead of their competition…
August 17th, 2009 at 10:02 am
The article’s sweeping assumption that “Good Enough” is well, good enough, is extremely off base. As a V-Architect of a revenue generating data center, we place a premium on the virtualization platform that provides top shelf performance, HA and management. I wouldn’t stake my reputation on any else.
Microsoft will gain a significant portion of market share from SMBs in particular as they will be lured by Free. But BigBoy virtualization deployments will find MS a hard sell, at least for a while.
August 19th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Love it! Well done! You nailed that right in the head. I’ve buy you a beer the next time I see you. (I’ve sent it to my boss)
September 8th, 2009 at 4:21 am
I recently had a customer who went with Hyper-V due to the cost (free) and a “good enough” attitude (they also didn’t click well with their VMware rep for some reason). Well, they recently sent through a purchase order for a vSphere implementation. I have a feeling this scenario will become not too uncommon.
Though a rant, it was a great wrap-up Mike!