"IOMG products have ZERO potential for replacing A drives. The news announcement was pure hype. A drives cost OEMs about $20, vrs. IOMG products at about $60 wholesale.
Forget it. The ones to get out alive are the lucky ones on this STILL overhyped and overpriced stock!"
Howard, I believe you are displaying a certain amount of ignorance in this post.
First, to do a straight cost comparison on two products which are so difference is silly. A 1.44 MB floppy drive costs 20 bucks and a Zip costs 60. Fine. But the Zip holds 70 times more data. Which means that if I can use it as a bootable device, then I can create a boot disk which has a complete Windows 95 or NT installation on it, including my backup software, which means I can recover from a hard disk failure much more easily.
This is a significant feature, with significant benefits for users, and the announcement of it, therefore, is certainly not just hype.
That having been said, I will reiterate something I have said before in this forum. To wit, that I don't really see the Zip replacing the floppy in the near future anyway. I see them coexisting, for most users. There are still plenty of uses for the lowly, cheap floppy disk. BUT I also believe that there is still a tremendous potential market for the Zip. People will continue to buy them as aftermarket products, to use with PCs which already have 1.44 MB drives. And PC manufacturers will build more and more PCs which include BOTH a 1.44 MB drive and a Zip drive.
And now, because it can be used as a bootable device, the PC makers will even be able to make computers which have ONLY a Zip.
I, for one, would be very happy to have a system which had both a Zip and a 1.44 MB floppy, with the Zip configured as drive A, and the 1.44 configured as B. The new Phoenix or AMI BIOS would allow me through a simple setup screen to swap the drive letters if I ever needed to boot from the 1.44 floppy.
Now, Howard, as to the second part of your post, once again I'm quite sure you have missed the mark. I note that the consensus of ALL the Wall Street firms which track this stock is that it is a buy at these levels, and that the company will continue to show strong growth in both revenue and earnings in '97. The stock definitely got ahead of itself in May, but it has seen its lows already and it will be moving up from here.
Overhyped and overpriced? Come back here in six months and we'll see.
- Allen Murdock |
