Sam, whatever happened to the disk drive thread? I wanted to post this.
.....Darrin Bulik, technical marketing manager at Western Digital, said that at his and many competitors' companies, the cost of handling warranties exceeds their sales and marketing expense, and can eat up to 2 percent to 3 percent of revenue.
Because of the complexity of tracking warranties over time, Western Digital tracks 100 million records, each requiring 65 Kbytes in capacity, necessitating a 6.5-Tbyte database, said Bulik. "Our financials and manufacturing, using Oracle, are not close to that database in size," he said....
......Western Digital's Rutledge blamed his company for starting the move to offer three-year warranties on basic hard drives, which were put in place when the average drive was sold for $175 and offered 20-percent margins.
"Our move was based on erroneous data," Rutledge said. "We thought this was an inexpensive feature. I'll admit we were the idiots that started this mess. I'll also admit that Maxtor was the bravest to end this mess, followed by Seagate. I'm a little chicken, following the others."
crn.com |
