Cruel: Storage Startup Lists Its Advantages

Below is an actual paragraph (yes, a single paragraph) taken from the page of a storage startup. Believe it or not, the page is headlined "Our Advantages." It has just about everything that can be cruel to read. Bad grammar. Loaded with superlatives. Laden with industry jargon and buzzwords. Run-on sentences. Acronym not spelled out with first use. Capitalizing what shouldn't be capitalized. Landmark ease of management?

This company raised $6M last quarter and their site lists no less than eight (8) executives - including a "Senior Vice President" of Marketing no less. They have money and lots of executives. Meaning, they probably didn't outsource their content to eLance or skip the editing process.

"The architecture of the <<Product>> offers a unique combination of advantages that are unprecedented in the industry. In addition to the great application performance, it is ideal for customers seeking to reduce cost and complexity by consolidating dozens of file servers or multiple other NAS devices onto a single infrastructure. The <<Product>> architecture also delivers diversified performance, utilizing a dedicated bi-directional high-speed data path, in hardware, providing the ability to transfer data on and off your network faster than any other storage solution. In addition, the exclusive hardware accelerated file system is a highly optimized architecture embedded in Field Programmable Gate Arrays, enabling processing in hardware versus competitive software solutions to offer more application performance per unit energy than any alternative competitive technology. Combined with the ability to dynamically grow the storage on an existing storage system, <<Company>> provides a scalable storage solution that can grow in capacity as needs expand. Total cost of ownership is significantly reduced due to the <<Product>> family's exceptional throughput, high availability and landmark ease of management."

- John

Comments

[WOW Over $210M raised... now that's funding!]

This company has raised another $6m ??? This funding brings its total raised to date to over $210 million. They are in the midst of a $100M+ IPO (filed in 2007, and now in limbo it seems). From their amended Dec '07 S1 filing, "As of July 31, 2007, our accumulated deficit was $170.3 million."

Wow, best of luck to them as the go up against EMC and NetApp.