Mary,
No need for the "Dr. Carroll" bit. Getting a PhD just
means you're certified to do certain kinds of research. It
doesn't confer any royal mantle on you. I teach American
history, and Article I of the US Constitution prohibits
the conferring of titles of nobility here. "Tom" will do
for this supporter of democracy, thank you.
I'm no computer expert, of course, and the only actual
JAZ drive I've ever seen in the flesh was at the June 1995
PC Expo in NYC. (That was clearly a prototype, not a
production model, of course.) Thus I don't know for sure
that the JAZ will be a BOOTABLE removable hard drive. IOMG
would be crazy not to make it so, to be sure. Their
Bernoullis were, and I've seen one post somewhere here
that says somebody is already using one to have two
different operating systems in a PC. So I think the
idea of dispensing entirely with the fixed hard drive
is technically possible.
That leaves the issues of cost and perceived desirability.
Sure, KE will make it cheaper and cheaper over time. I doubt,
though, that he'll ever completely eliminate the premium one
pays over fixed for the removability. Still, if the
differential were small enough, and it's possible that
IOMG will be able to get the differential very, very
small, especially because they don't need to get any
profit from the drive per se, as you point out, then
people might just jump to it if they think it's worth it.
There, though, is the rub. Just how many of those
buyers of the 40 million PCs a year are gonna want to
use _two or more operating systems_ on their machines?
Everybody I know is reeling from having to learn something
new (OS, word processor, web browser, email package, you
name it) practically every week, and the majority of
users don't even have the basic keystrokes and style
conventions down yet for the few applications they
use regularly. For that reason, I don't think there's
going to be all that much demand for the multiple-OS
configuration of a JAZ-only machine. It could happen,
perhaps, if code bloat continues and you need a full
2 GB JAZ drive just to boot into your copy of MS Office
for Win98, but that's down the road a bit.
What I think is a whole lot more likely for the JAZ
usage is that it'll be used for two things. One, it'll
be used for backup of 1 GB hard drives. That's clearly
what I want one for. Stick in the cartridge, press a
key or two, visit the euphemism or make a phone call,
then pull out a whole mirror of your system and take
it to a remote site where you'll be safe if your main
site burns down or your PC gets stolen, etcetera. The
Zip is pretty good for that, but you still have to
use a little bundle of disks and tend them as the
backup proceeds. Two, if it catches on enough, JAZ
could be used in tandem with a modest-sized fixed
disk to make a whole system. You keep the basic
OS and a few key apps on your internal hard drive,
back up that configuration on a JAZ cartridge now
and then for safe keeping, and keep all your other
apps and data files on various JAZ cartridges. These
strike me as the most sensible uses.
I see two technical considerations here. One,
if you have no internal hard drive at all, and only
one JAZ drive, how are you going to back up your,
uh, "stuff"? Are you really going to swap JAZ
cartridges back and forth the way you used to have
to swap floppies back and forth for a DISKCOPY command
if you only had a single drive of a given size? Nah.
Maybe DRAM prices will drop so low that people will have
enough memory in the machine to make a 1 GB diskcopy of
this sort feasible, but I doubt it. Two large-capacity
drives are needed in a system to make backup work, so
there'll be use for a cheap internal fixed drive for
backing up if for nothing else. Two, this is hard
drive technology in the JAZ. The jury is still out
on whether or not you can drop the suckers onto the
floor and have them survive. If you can't, that'll
seriously limit their acceptance and the uses you
can put them through. When I asked the IOMG person
at the IOMG booth at PC-Expo in June 1995 if you
could bash around the JAZ cartridge the way you
could the Bernoullis, all he said was that the product
used hard drive technology, and he smiled. My guess
is that they'll make them tough, all right, so that
"reasonable" wear and tear won't hurt them, but they'll
be hard-pressed to ever festoon their booth with
displays for them that show them playing fine while
being jiggled like a washing-machine agitator, which
is what they used to do with their Bernoulli displays.
Time will tell. I'm going to this year's PC Expo in
two weeks, and I'll see what I can find out about
their ruggedness. This is in stark contrast to the
Zip cartridges, which by all accounts are really tough.
One possible configuration I can think of is indeed
really intriguing, though. In some settings, you have a
whole lot of people coming and going, each needing to
sit down to a PC intermittently. This is so with the
grad students in my academic department, for example,
and is also the case for sales staffs who go on the
road and only occasionally check in at the home office.
For places that don't go with the laptops-for-all-with-
docking-stations option, you could have a PC with no
internal hard disk at all, but _two_ Jaz drives. One
would be for you to insert your personal OS cartridge
from which to boot. Viola! It becomes your machine,
configured just as you want it. The other would be
for you to make a safe backup while you are at the
office. Just a thought. Extrapolate that far into
the future and it could be that we'll all have our
little JAZ cartridge and will be able to do things
like plug them into the "stations" in our hotel rooms,
or into the "station" at the Home Depot where you
want to interactively design your house with the
remodeling expert they have on staff. You get the
idea. Right now, though, that kind of stuff is
only a pipe dream. I wouldn't recommend investing
on that basis unless you have lotsa spare cash (in
which case I'd be grateful for a consulting fee in
return for this post ;) ).
I don't think we know yet how the JAZ will be
used, other than the obvious one of backing up our
1 GB hard drives. So maybe you're right. Who would
have imagined the Acer Basic configuration for the
Zip drive six months or a year ago? As long as the
thing is a technical success and the price comes down
to about $250 or so, it'll sell well and be put to
all kinds of uses. I'd be happy to speculate further
as soon as there are enough JAZ drives out there in
the field to be sure they're not going to have a
high cartridge-failure problem or otherwise be lemons.
As soon as we know they're selling in quantity at
retail and are working in the field, we can invest
confidently on the basis of their being 1 GB backup
devices, and speculate on the rest. At least, that's
where I'm putting my money. From your posts, you've
got quite a bit more to play with than I do, so you
might want to get a tad more speculative here than
I can afford to be.
Why speculate, though? The Zip is here, now, and
$220 million a quarter isn't mere "momentum".
Cheers, Tom |
