The End of the C:\ Drive?

The trick for storage systems leaders such as EMC, Hitachi, and IBM will be to gently and indirectly promote storage architectures capable of scaling down, in order to substantiate new standards that may eventually enable new customers to scale up. At the same time, however, these companies cannot appear to lose focus on their existing, high-end customer base. So the standards comprising the second wave must make a self-evident value proposition for downward scalability, without the need for explicit demonstration. Perhaps this can be accomplished by letting other companies - future partners - make the case for them.