As a young lad, my Dad had purchased a 1946 Wyllis Jeep. For any of you who are Jeep aficionados, you know that this is a direct, post-war Jeep complete with starter button (war Jeeps didn't have car keys) and four-wheel shift gears). Dad had this thing re-fitted with a power take-off (a rear-gear for attaching appliances) and had purchased a bush-hog to attach to it. Off my Dad went on our property, Jeep in full tilt and bush-hog in tow, slicing and dicing bushes and small trees from our property like a veteran landscape engineer.
One day the trailer hitch had a an issue - the towing ball had somehow become bent and needed replacement. Yes, Dad worked these machines to their extreme. Now, if you feel a bit out of place with all these odd terms, imagine my hubris in thinking I knew everything about them just by watching my Dad work with them from the sidelines.
In any case, he took the Jeep in to a shop to get the thing fixed, and this mechanic started working on the trailer hitch to loosen it up. Strange thing, though, he was turning the bolt clockwise to get it undone. And everyone knows that in order to undo a bolt, you turn it counterclockwise, right? Of course, those in Australia and Brazil might not turn it this way, but that's an inside joke, too. So I quipped, "You're turning it the wrong way."
To which this mechanic simply replied, willing to engage an uppity kid while my Dad just offered me a hot stare, "Are you sure?". To which I responded, thinking that the mechanic actually thought I was a viable entity, "Yep, I'm sure." To which the mechanic said, "You want to bet ten dollars on it?" To which I immediately responded, thinking easy money - "You bet."
At this point my Dad simply leaned into me and said the words I would never forget, even to this day, as I share them with you.
"Never bet on the other man's game."
This initially had a hollow ring, considering that I was on the brink of winning ten dollars, but in that moment the mechanic wrested the object free from its mooring in spite of having turned it the wrong way all that time. And I learned something new, that some devices actually do unscrew in a clockwise direction. Lesson learned, and I did not lose ten dollars. The mechanic was merciful.
Licking my wounds and regarding my status of having dodged a bullet, I gained a new appreciation of knowledge, learned in a simple way, that the other man's game is something to approach with high trepidation and respect. If it really is the other man's game, he knows it better than I, so what business do I have on betting with it? It's a sucker bet at best. He knows the game better than I do.
So it is with the appliance wanna-bees who have attempted to bet on Netezza's game. That the appliance is the way to go, and they have invested many millions of dollars in attempting to topple Netezza, or at least steal the market share. But this is yet another case of betting on the other man's game, and nobody knows this game better than Netezza.
And now, Netezza has changed the game, leaving the competitiion in the dust to once again lick its wounds and wonder, why did they ever bet on the other man's game, and now, what game are they really in?
The new Netezza architecture has upped-the-ante on the existing game, and moved the game in another direction that in no uncertain terms, changes the game and the stakes to play it.
Apart from browsing the white papers and gathering your own general specification insights to the environment, I can say as a veteran who has worked with this technology extensively that I had a short wish list of things that I thought would be really nice to have. I had a short list of what I thought were functional shortcomings that I had found simple workarounds for, and could painlessly ignore. But now, with the new architecture, those few shortcomings were washed away. The short wish list was fulfilled, and so much more. And in the end, I am a happy clam.
On the short runway of things I am looking forward to - include the capacity to cache whole tables, Linux on the lower deck, the Intel-programmability of the parallel environment, and the additional capacity both in storage and in processing power. And these are just a few of my favorite things.
Once upon a time, I worked with real-time engines for embedded systems, and was enamored with one software vendor's ability to stay ahead of the pack by simply assimilating the innovations of other competitors. One has to imagine that once a vendor is out-in-front, they can maintain their position through this assimilation process. If they are not out in front, then assimilating other vendors' innovations doesn't have the same impact, because nobody is a frontrunner.
That Netezza can take the innovations of other (major) vendors such as IBM and leverage them through simple assimilation, is yet another testimony to Netezza's position as the well-in-front frontrunner. While other vendors attempt to duplicate or imitate, Netezza just moves on, changes the game and leaves them in the dust. Innovations from the vendor remain ensconced (and enhanced) in the new architecture, while other technologies are easily assimilated. That this has given the architecture a stratospheric boost is a testimony to the original architects and visionaries, as well as the existing ones.
All that's a lot of gushy sentiment, though, compared to the tailspins that the wanna-bee competitors have been in since they got their first news that the winds were changing. I could use a lot of sailor/sailing analogs here, but I'll spare you. The fact remains, the competitors are scrambling all-hands-on-deck to reset their goal for market share they never really achieved. Could this mean that they are sunk altogether and don't know it yet? Who has a crystal ball, except that we could now pump these quantities into the Netezza architecture and get an answer back faster than they could.
Right answer faster: Priceless.
