HTCAP: Chapter 9

Last chapter! It came too soon!

Dave Hitz realized that "whining is the evil twin to vision" so he started writing a future history of the company. Rather than writing his good ideas for what he wanted the company to become in the future tense, he'd use the past tense as though those things had already happened. He never says exactly what was in that future history. I wish he had, but I guess those are secrets OR they've already happened by now!

Then Dave Hitz talked about how there was the personal computing age, then the networking age, and now we're in the data age. Individual computing and being on the network is no longer as important as gathering and searching through data so the people who sell data storage really rule the world!

Wow, what a great book. The last line was an oh shit moment though because Dave Hitz wrote "Always listen to my mother." Almost a year ago, I took advice from Dave Hitz from the first chapter to never listen to my mother. I thought he was totally right at the time, and Mom and I haven't really spoken since. But I get it now, so here's my future history.

After finishing HTCAB, I sent my mom a copy with a note telling her to read the whole thing. Then I called her up, and we laughed about the whole thing and talked for an hour about our favorite parts of the book. Later, Dave Hitz offered me a job so now I'm working directly for him, learning from his every move!

I've said it before. Dave Hitz is a genius. I hope you've enjoyed these reviews. We'll see where this blog goes from here.

HTCAB: Engineers

In HTCAB, Dave Hitz had some great stories about engineers that I wanted to share:

On a walk in the woods, an engineer sees a frog sitting on a rock. The frog says, "Hey, I'm not really a frog. If you kiss me I'll turn into a beautiful princess." The engineer picks up the frong and looks at it.
The frog says. "Aren't you going to kiss me?" The engineer shakes his head and sticks the frog in his pocket. The frog pokes its head out and whispers, "Look, if you kiss me I will do anything you want . . . anything." The engineer says, "Nah," and stuffs the frog deeper into his pocket.
The frog shouts, "I've got to get out of this frog body. I'll be your girlfriend for a year." The engineer says, "Who has time for a girlfriend? But a talking frog: that's really cool."

So true! I haven't had a girlfriend for a long time.

A young engineer was leaving the office at 7 P.M. when he found the CEO standing in front of a paper shredder with a document in his hand. "Listen," said the CEO, "this is important, and my secretary has left. Can you make this thing work?"
"Certainly," said the young engineer. He turned the machine on, inserted the paper, and pressed the start button. "Excellent, excellent!" said the CEO as his paper disappeared inside the machine. "I only need one copy."

Man, CEOs are dumb! I hope Dave Hitz's CEO never saw that or he'd be pissed. Or maybe that's a real story about his CEO!

The pessimist sees the glass as half empty. The optimist sees the glass as half full. The engineer says, "This glass is twice as big as it needs to be."

Q: What's the difference between an introverted engineer and an extroverted engineer?
A: The extroverted engineer looks at your shoes when he talked to you.

So true. I guess CEOs are dumb, but I guess the message is that at least they'd make girlfriends out of their talking frogs.

HTCAB: Chapter 8

It took me a long time to write the review for this chapter because I didn't understand all the details. I guess they were trying to decide if they should do SAN when they already did NAS. Dave Hitz "created the NAS market" because it was better than SAN, but then the dot com bubble burst, and the chairman of the board said, "In this economy, if someone wants to give you their money, I recommend that you take it." So then they did both SAN and NAS. I wish this book had come out after the latest recession so Dave Hitz could show how that compared to the dot com bust, but I guess that means there's room for a sequel!

Dave Hitz Himself!!

Today I got the biggest thrill yet! Dave Hitz was speaking at a conference and I was able to get my copy of HTCAB that I love so much autographed by noone other than DAVE HITZ HIMSELF!

I knew that he had seen this blog because he posted a comment a long time ago. But I never thought he'd remember it and remember me. Can you imagine a better gift?

Dave Hitz, if you're still reading this I know that I didn't finish this blog reviewing every chapter of HTCAB, and I kind of lost focus, but now I know I really need to focus and get it done. It's the least I can do.

One last thing, I want to make sure everyone notices Dave Hitz's signature! It's just 4 vertical lines and a long Z all the way through. SO COOL!

HTCAB: Chapter 7

"This chapter is the story of how NetApp learned to satisfy the largest corporations in the world and matured into a grown-up company." That pretty much sums it up. I don't know if he saw the current situation coming, but Dave Hitz wrote:

Fortunately for us, the tech crash sent the economy south, and the recession was good for us. It created so much pain that conservative enterprise customers were forced to consider new solutions. The attitude changed from, I'll be promoted if I keep things working to I'll be fired if I don't cut costs. The tech crash also gave us extra incentive to go after the nterprise companies, because our Internet and technology customers -- 70 percent of our revenue -- pretty much stopped buying.

The implication is pretty clear that this current and worse recession is going to be even better for NetApp especially considering that they used to be fighting to get into all these deals, and now everyone knows about Dave Hitz's company!

Next up came more of Dave Hitz playing with ideas:

I love using thought experiments to test ideas. On a business trip, I noticed a coffee machine in my hotel room, and I started asking myself questions. What if I were Mr. Hilton, and I had hundreds of hotels, each with hundreds of rooms, and each room had a Mr. Coffee? What would my problems be -- aside from my granddaughter Paris -- and how would I solve them?

The idea is that coffee makers probably break all the time, and there's no way to know so people staying in the hotel rooms would have no coffee, no way to make it, and no way to get a new coffee maker. Dave Hitz came up with the idea to have the coffee makers phone in to mission control in case they were broken. Brilliant! And take that Paris Hilton!

HTCAB: Grown-Up Company

Before starting the chapters about NetApp as a grown-up company, Dave Hitz writes about a couple of his favorite books: The Innovators Dilemma and Inside the Tornado. They're totally next on my list after I finish HTCAB.

Dave Hitz writes that an important lesson he learned was that "low-end technologies tend to move upmarket and outperform high-end technologies." This is exactly what Dave Hitz has done at NetApp to rise from a small company to the #1 company to work at.

Christensen's theories helped me understand how NetApp and NAS could win against larger and more entrenched competitors, first against Auspex, and later against major IT vendors like IBM, HP, and EMC. NetApp's NAS started as a low-end technology that was only good enough for small workgroups. Our competitors sold a different type of storage called SAN, whicih was -- at first -- faster and more reliable, but also much more expensive and harder to manage. As NAS improved over time, we found ourselves competing against SAN and winning.

This is exactly now Dave Hitz got to the top and how he'll stay there.

HTCAB: Truthful Interlude

To be honest, the interlude after Chapter 6 kind of lost me. I kind of knew that I was in trouble when Dave Hitz started it with "Sometimes I like to play with ideas." When Dave Hitz starts like that, what chance to I have to keep up!

The basic idea, I think, is that there are some things that you can prove to be true, but there are other things that you just trust to be true because they make things easier. But I'm not really, and here's where Dave Hitz really lost me:

Maybe we should keep looking for scientific-truths that are just as convincing as important useful-truths. Perhaps we could even discover a scientific-religion. If you believe that religions offer useful-truths that are not scientific-truths, then the trick would be to find the corresponding scientific-truths. You might supplement God says be nice to your neighbors with Axelrod's computer simulations proce that you should be nice to your neighbors."

Man, deep stuff! Next Dave Hitz writes "I have wandered far into the clouds." Whew! Glad it's not just me. I'm not sure how this stuff ties into the rest of the book, but I'm glad for the interludes so that Dave Hitz doesn't have to just follow the conventional structure for what management books are like (including starting from Chapter 0)!