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8<br />
Strategic Change<br />
On Reversing Course, Chocolate,<br />
Debates, and Core Beliefs<br />
Suppose your church believes, “Jesus Christ is the one true<br />
Lord,” and then one day you are told, “But Allah is also great.<br />
Worship Allah too.” That is how I felt when some heretics<br />
suggested that NetApp should consider selling SAN in addition<br />
to NAS. What’s more, James Lau was one <strong>of</strong> the heretics!<br />
It may seem odd that I could have such strong beliefs about<br />
a nit-picky technical issue, but I did, and so did many others.<br />
In the end, there were even NetApp employees who quit over<br />
this dispute, so I think the religious metaphor is appropriate,<br />
although—as far as I know—we had no stonings, crucifixions,<br />
or jihads. This chapter describes the challenge <strong>of</strong> confronting<br />
radical change in your business strategy.<br />
NAS stands for Network-Attached Storage, while SAN<br />
stands for Storage Area Network. From the names alone you<br />
can tell they are pretty similar—both about storage and both<br />
about networks. It was the classic high-end/low-end situation.<br />
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