In a stunning demonstration of branding over substance, Network Appliance, the market leader in corporate NAS, has decided that its biggest problem is that its target market of the top 5,000 storage-using organizations in the world had never heard of it. To address this problem it, like FedEx before it, adopted the company's nickname of NetApp as the official name and decided to use the worst stylized N logo since NBC in the '80s. Various other bloggers have compared it to Stonehenge, a staple, and a Lego piece. The Register points out that a Dutch JiffyLube-type operator has a logo at least as similar as the Nebraska public TV log was to NBC's.

Personally, I can't imagine that more than 200 of the 5,000 customers they're targeting haven't heard of NetApp. More likely, most of them have pigeonholed NetApp as a NAS company, ignoring the fact that NetApp filers also do block storage via iSCSI and Fibre Channel and the rest of the product line. A new tag line -- "NetApp, we're not just file servers any more," may have been more to the point. Basically, I'm just glad I'll never have to read an EMCer's blog refer to it as NTAP (its ticker symbol) again.

To see the new logo and Dutch Novatio's version, click here

For a blast from NBC's past, try here.