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.

Comments

7 Responses to “Barney partnerships”

  1. Vertica’s innovative architecture for Flash, plus more about temp space than you perhaps wanted to know | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on August 16th, 2010 3:07 am

    […] Barney […]

  2. Daniel L Weinreb on August 19th, 2010 6:41 am

    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.

  3. Don’t try to emulate the Treaty of Torsedillas | Strategic Messaging on October 3rd, 2010 7:50 pm

    […] 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 […]

  4. Now we know why Vertica has been so weirdly evasive | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on February 14th, 2011 11:34 am

    […] 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 […]

  5. Juggling analytic databases : DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on March 16th, 2012 5:09 am

    […] made a Barney announcement with Hortonworks, emphasizing its love for Hadoop as a companion to Teradata Classic […]

  6. Notes and comments, May 6, 2014 | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on May 6th, 2014 8:47 am

    […] 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 […]

  7. Pitfalls for Pollyannas | Strategic Messaging on December 4th, 2014 7:32 pm

    […] “Look at all our partner logos. Our validation is tremendous!” (I love you. You love me. We’re best friends like friends should be.) […]

Leave a Reply




Feed including blog about strategic marketing and messaging in technology and politics Subscribe to the Monash Research feed via RSS or email:

Login

Search our blogs and white papers

Monash Research blogs

User consulting

Building a short list? Refining your strategic plan? We can help.

Vendor advisory

We tell vendors what's happening -- and, more important, what they should do about it.

Monash Research highlights

Learn about white papers, webcasts, and blog highlights, by RSS or email.