Our real market, though, was the Mac-based pre-press market. Among our very few customers was an outfit in California that produced, um, adult magazines. I didn't get to the customer site, but the reports from our field team indicated that, after the initial shock, you could get used to working in a shop that had banner-sized, um, adult photography on the walls.
Early in the development process of the server, we had made a commitment to demonstrate our new server at a trade show. Things weren't going well. The server wasn't ready and morale was low. We started to talk about the idea of skipping of the trade show.
The VP of engineering sent a masterful letter to the troops that concluded, "We will be at the show and we will be awesome."
We found renewed energy and did indeed deliver a system to the show. Sort of.
The engineers were able to get software that could write data to the server. The software to read the data, however, wasn't working. We had a high-speed, high-capacity write-only file server.
Through the brilliance of high-tech obfuscatory marketing, we were able to line up a few beta customers at the show. Eventually, the software was able to read what it wrote. That added feature, however, wasn't enough to save the company.
It's now 2010 and the Cloud is cool. So, some clever folks have created a cloud-enabled write-only service:
It's fast, cheap, secure, and, best of all, in the cloud.
We were ahead of our time and didn't know it.
The specs on our server were stunning. Initially we offered 48GB of storage, later 96GB, RAID-0 at 10MB/sec. In a 300lb. box, along with a separate (required) UPS unit. The 96GB unit went for $100K. The spec sheet is here.
1 comment:
That is hysterically funny. You may remember that sometime after the unmentionable three-letter company, I worked for a company whose one customer was Victoria's Secret. We didn't have artwork; we had sales posters. Our conference rooms were named after models (Gisele was one at the time.) Young 20-something male-types would drool slightly during interviews. And the head of HR (female) and my boss (female) both quizzed me to make sure I could tolerate working in an environment that some might call hostile to women.
Perfect startup environment, I'd say. At one point we had a "girls dorm" where five of us worked out of one converted conference room. We put a post-it note tennis dress on our model, which made things much more comfortable.
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