August 12, 2010
Barney partnerships
Named after a certain ubiquitous, fictitious purple dinosaur, “Barney” partnership announcements are ones in which two or more vendors do a song and dance about how much they love each other, but offer little or no substance beyond that.
I use and even define that term fairly frequently, so I decided to create a URL where I explain it once and for all.
Due to their mind-numbing, vacuous repetitiveness, Barney announcements can be highly irritating to press and analysts. I understand that the original Barney has a similar effect on people.
Edit: Here’s a link to Barney’s iconic theme song.
Categories: Technology marketing
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[…] Barney […]
Back in the old days of Object Design, we had several press releases about alliances, but at the time we put them out, we really did think they meant something. How were we to know that the other party was fickle and being cads, using us (so to speak)? We had a great press announcement with Steve Jobs about how we were going to run our software on the wonderful NeXT box. W certainly would have done so; if you go back and look, we ported to nearly every Unix that existed, and even some that did not exist but were supposed to be “coming soon” (I don’t suppose you remember the Canon Unix box?). Back then it was such a thrill to have Steve Jobs stand up in front of a swooning crowd and talk about us. But it never came to pass.
[…] recently decried a very common kind of “partnership,” widely known as Barney, in which the marketing fluff far exceeds the substance. Some of my clients, however, are running […]
[…] Colin told me there would be a few partnerships, and that one of them would go beyond Barney. I’ve got to give him credit for underselling on that […]
[…] made a Barney announcement with Hortonworks, emphasizing its love for Hadoop as a companion to Teradata Classic […]
[…] The recently-announced Cloudera/MongoDB relationship* is still at the Barney stage. That said, I’m optimistic that their stated intention to add substance to the […]
[…] “Look at all our partner logos. Our validation is tremendous!” (I love you. You love me. We’re best friends like friends should be.) […]