Interlude - Index of

130 | Grown-Up Company
reliability that was normally associated with mature corporate
data centers and they were unhappy if they didn’t get it.
I remember a particularly painful meeting with Yahoo in
the mid-nineties. Yahoo was one of our largest Internet customers,
and they stored all of their e-mail on NetApp. They
told us, “We built our entire infrastructure on your equipment.
Our customer base is doubling every three months, and
your NAS storage has allowed us to scale faster than anything
else we can imagine. But if we could find an alternative to
NetApp, we would throw you out in an instant.”
Their complaint: “You aren’t reliable enough.” Quality that’s
great for a department of engineers doesn’t cut it for a giant data
center supporting millions of customers.
We could have told Yahoo, “We’re sorry that you chose
to build a high-reliability data center out of workgroup equipment.
It’s no surprise that it doesn’t meet your needs. This
must be very difficult for you.” Yahoo was frustrated with us,
but really it was a tough love message. They hoped NetApp
would succeed, because they depended on us to enable their
rapid growth. We could have turned them down, but they represented
enormous opportunity. Not only was Yahoo a big customer,
but we felt that other Internet companies would face the
same issues. What’s more, we were getting similar complaints
from Cisco, which was one of our largest tech customers. They
loved our systems at first, but like Yahoo, they started running
into reliability problems when they had installed hundreds of
them. We decided to focus on Yahoo's and Cisco’s needs.
James and I had mostly worked in small companies, and
we were clueless about big companies with big data centers.
We no longer had an intuitive understanding of our customers’
needs. I suppose it’s inevitable that the strategy of sticking