>>With all this about ATOMM, I am curious about your comments suggesting that IOM licensed zip technology from Sony and or Fuji. Does this mean that they got the media from Fuji and the drive from Sony, (or just one of the above) and that IOM is just a marketing co?<<
David -
Zip disks are made using ATOMM technology from Fuji for the actual data surfaces. However, the Zip drive and Zip disk were developed in-house by Iomega. They are definitely not just a marketing company.
Yes, as you said, the Zip was designed using the "old" Bernoulli technology, owned by Iomega.
It has become fashionable in some quarters to say that Iomega's products are successful only because of marketing. In fact the engineers at Iomega are pretty good, too. The Zip drive is just as robust as it needs to be to do the job it was designed to do. Jaz also works beautifully, and reports of problems with it have been grossly overstated.
Going off the track just a bit, here's a related comment:
I will say that if Iomega had done a better job on the tech support side early on, they would have less of a PR problem concerning Jaz, particularly in the Mac community. Most Jaz problems with Macs have turned out to be due to third-party disk drivers, such as those included with FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit, conflicting with the Iomega drivers. But I don't think Iomega did a good job of helping Mac users deal with these conflicts, or of spreading the word. FWB claims that their current drivers support Zip and Jaz (and other removables) flawlessly, but I cannot confirm this personally.
- Allen |
