Ralph Waldo Emerson is credited with the remark, "Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door." So what have mousetraps and storage got to do with each other? Not a lot at first glance but if you have ever looked a buying a mousetrap; you might find there are more variations on a theme than you can possibly imagine but at the end of the day, they are simply variations on a theme. (useful hint: mice don’t like cheese but they love chocolate, bait your traps with chocolate).
So what makes one sell more than the other? I suspect their levels of efficiency are fairly similar and when we suffered a minor mouse invasion; we simply looked through the range and picked what we believed was going to be the most simple to use. Some of them just looked more complex than they needed to be and the simple snap-trap just seemed to be what was required.
Installation and set-up was pretty simple and within fairly short order our mouse invasion was terminated.
In years gone-by, we could have lived with the problem, bought a cat or hired a rat-catcher. Now we wouldn’t even consider living with the problem, buying a cat would be for companionship not for catching mice and the rat-catcher is pretty much a dead profession. Yes on occasion, we do need specialist pest-control people for bigger problems but in general we can deal with the problem ourselves.
We have developed better ways of controlling pests; changing environments, improvements in technology and the mass production of the humble snap-trap has generally reduced the need for rat-catchers. And historically it has been suggested that rat-catchers may even have increased demand for their services by breeding rats themselves.
So what has this got to do with storage? Not a lot I guess but the person who builds a better tool for controlling storage better watch out for the rat-catchers of the modern age; we wouldn’t want just anyone to be able to do it now, would we? Still, it’s unfortunate that the rat-breeders make a lot of money from supplying rat-catchers who are experts in building complex mouse-traps.
Another interesting fact, there are over 4000 patents for mouse-traps but only 20 or so have ever made any money with the humble and simple 'Little Nipper' snap-trap capturing over 60% of the market.
Hi Martin
Interesting analogy, but how would the story change if the number of rats increased by 60% per year, no matter what you did? That’s the rough information growth rate — good economy or bad.
And what if the rat’s bite was more poisonous every year? That’s the increasing penalties for information breaches, poor compliance and/or poor governance.
At some point, cheaper rat traps become less interesting, and better ones become intriguing, no?
— Chuck
Hey, I wasn’t asking for a cheaper mouse-trap! I’m asking for a better one, one which works, one which isn’t overly complex to set-up and one which doesn’t need a degree in rat catching!!
Oh and a mousetrap that doesn’t require expensive bait and an expensive rat-catcher to set, monitor and manage it would be rather good 🙂
Chuck – re the 60% growth, how does this ‘information growth’ compare to unique data? Is it really relevant to include PVC & MP3 style content in the count when 99% of that is duplicate qtys for user consumption? how does the figure for data-centre storage growth compare?