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.