A few weeks ago I published a two-part blog post entitled “Everyone Has A Backup Application They Hate…It’s Usually The One They Are Using.” This was brought to mind when a friend recently forwarded the URL to a SpiceWorks user thread. In this thread, the alleged “market leader” in backup software asked users what they thought of the latest version of the product. As of this writing there have been 126 replies and I saw three that were positive. It would not be inaccurate to state that they are being treated to a first-class roasting by their users. It is one of the great puzzles of marketing psychology: how can a product that is so universally reviled be the “market leader”?
Perhaps that position atop the backup market is changing. Unitrends has lately been grabbing market share in great big chunks, growing 72% in the past year alone. Their SpiceWorks user thread, by comparison, is over 90% positive, and is peppered with comments such as “Great install, great support team, great web interface, lots of features, great product”, “I can wholeheartedly recommend the Unitrends solution”, “Operation has been flawless” and my personal favorite: “I love my Unitrends box.” Honestly, after 20+ years in the backup & recovery business, I had never (until now) heard of a customer who “loves” their backup solution.
So, in conclusion, it seems as though I may have to retract my assertion several weeks ago about everyone “hating” their backup application. I’ll have to modify it to state that everyone except Unitrends users hates their backup application.
Full disclosure: Southern Data Storage sells Unitrends. Don’t take my word for it – simply Google “Unitrends” and read for yourself. I will also happily provide the URLs for the SpiceWorks threads I mentioned in this post. Just email me at mark@southerndatastorage.com.
I think that market leaders are very often hated. The nature of being a market leader means, almost universally, that sales are happening through a sales, not an engineering channel. In this case, that means that a bit marketing firm is pushing their product directly to business heads or clueless IT managers and the sale is based on marketing or the quality of the dinner that the vendor purchased them with little thought given to the quality of the product, the availability of support or the suitability for the firm (let alone the price.)
Read SpiceWorks for example, and see how many people state that a product was considered good based on nothing more than it being “the market leader!” To a competent IT professional this is unthinkable – sales volume obviously does not related to suitability or quality. Yet many small business people don’t realize this simple technical principle.
The nature of this relationship means that companies often buy a “bad” or unsuitable product and force it on either the existing or new IT staff who, in turn, hate the product because it does not meet their needs or is not what they did or would have chosen. There are entire categories of products, the one referenced above as a great example, that almost no IT professional would ever purchase themselves yet are sold in droves simply because the company in question focuses on sales that do an end run around the engineers selling directly to companies who forget to listen to their own technical staff before making IT buying decisions.