I probably have to take back my last blog post where I talked about why I am impressed with EMC on their Decho spin off which they had announced on the 16th November. The primary reason I thought that’s a very good move from EMC is that running Decho, and hence the online backup business Mozy, as a separate independent subsidiary with its own organization would create focus and also its own nimble culture to respond aggressively to the different business requirements of the SMB market segment. This would have been difficult to do internally by EMC itself as it is not easy to have multiple/polarized cultures within one organization as EMC’s culture which has primarily evolved from selling to a large corporate customer would have clashed with the culture required to focus and succeed in selling to SMBs.
Look at Decho’s blog. The only blog post they have made was the announcement of Decho which was posted on 16th November. There are quite a few comments to the blog post – even as recently as 4th December. Some of the comments even want them (Decho) to post more details or an update post etc. However, there is just silence from the team at Decho. No response of any sort! Not even a response in the comments section! As someone who has co-founded and worked in multiple startups, I can tell you that this is not a good sign as it may mean that the people at Decho are probably not a motivated lot or they have imbibed a big company culture from EMC and have forgotten what makes startups thrive.
The only inference I can draw from this is that EMC’s spinning off of Mozy and Pi as Decho is not really a positive move; at least internally, for the people involved. It is highly possible that EMC, after acquiring Mozy and Pi, has realized that their business model has no chance of profitable growth in the near future. In that case it’s probably perceived as a drain on EMC’s resources given the current economic environment. If my inference is true, it is highly possible that the folks at Decho are a disillusioned lot; this would also obviously explain the lack of response to comments in their blog post. Note that this type of situation is not unusual during acquisitions where a highly motivated startup team gets disillusioned and loses all motivation after an acquisition by a large company because things did not pan out as they expected them to. Obviously, in almost all cases, the startup founders would blame the large company for messing things up!
Only time will tell whether I have to eat my words (again) and stick to my original positive reading of EMC’s Decho spin off. But if my negative reading is true, we may see a day when EMC’s Mozy goes the AOL’s Xdrive route in a year or so!
