Getting My Feet Wet

Hi, my name is Jonathan and I’m the latest addition to the Seagate Family managing  Social Media for the consumer product line. In this day and age, that likely won’t be a head-scratcher for you, but in case it is, it means that I put together content that will go onto this blog and talk with our community on our various social network channels such as Twitter (@Seagate_Con) and Facebook.

Having spent a good portion of my career in the gaming industry, I jumped at this opportunity because I knew it would present me with new opportunities and challenges. In going through the interview process, I kept trying to wrap my head around the question “What makes storage sexy?” Video games is a fun business. It’s energetic, it’s creative, and at its core, it’s social. But data storage is something that would require a different approach.

Data storage is something that everyone needs, but isn’t something you think about until you need it. In explaining to my mother why I was interested in the position, I compared hard drives to a refrigerator or a washing machine. You have a need for it, but it isn’t a “luxury” item like a new TV, a game console or the latest smartphone.  Yet without it, how do you store photos? How can you watch movies or play music on the go?  Let’s take it even further – what if you’re a gamer, how do you save your player information or game files? In the world of television, there is this hard drive we all own, but know more commonly as the DVR. When you take a step back to look at it, data storage drives everything that we do today but it’s become so commonplace that we don’t even realize the extent of its reach.

So for the first couple weeks I have been spending some time thinking about what makes storage “sexy” and I think I’m on my way to finding the answer. Storage itself may not be sexy, but the creative ways storage is used are. The tingling feeling for me comes from the eye-opening illumination on how it impacts people day-to-day. It’s about about the creative or developmental process, not just the final product.

The cool story is what you are doing creatively that needs a canvas — whether it be a work of art, a musical composition, a photograph or a video. It can be as simple as a piece of homework that you got a good grade on or as complex as a chemical formula that will let you turn water into wine. It’s a story to tell. It’s information to save. It’s a memory to keep. And without a device to save that memory on, it will vanish to the wind and remain just a memory.

So let’s take a journey and start to explore the different ways that storage gets used in the everyday world and revisit some of the fascinating customer stories that are already out there as we begin to create our own.