Why was Lakehouse such a hard category to create internally and externally?

Internally, the seasoned people said do not do it. The word sounds ridiculous in an enterprise context. Strategy consultants ran surveys and told us nobody wanted it. They came back with category names like Unified Data Science Platform. Our sales reps said that made no sense either. Externally, when we launched it, people made fun of us online. Data rivers. Data rapids. Ha. But I held firm and made it a maniacal obsession across the whole company. If a press article about Databricks did not mention Lakehouse, that was a failure. If a customer win did not reference Lakehouse, that was a loss. Even if our conversion data showed that mentioning Lakehouse hurt ad performance, I made us use Lakehouse in the ads anyway. It took multiple years of that kind of religious commitment before the category took hold.