Re: "No momentum,no Cabot Mkt. Lett.,more competition,it's going down"
1. "No momentum,no Cabot Mkt. Lett." Mabye we'll see some orderly growth in this thing for a while (I found out about IOMG through Cabot, but can't sell it with the prospects it has out there. Some of us [subscribers] also *think*.) Doubling once every two months was fun while it lasted, but nobody could seriously believe that it would go on forever.
2. "more competition" I haven't seen any more competition now than before (Compaq, Syquest, the Japanese co. which is supposedly putting some high capacity drives in notebooks). There are rumors about others, but nothing on their boards (Seagate, WD). I think we would have seen somebody trumpeting their "Zip killers" if they existed. As for present competition, it still seems like Syquest is not going to make it, and Compaq is for now a one-horse show (no add-ons, no externals, no notebook drives).
One comment about several messages. There seems to be a rising tide of opinion that the drive and disk prices are going to fall off a cliff once they start going out in massive quantities. Why? They seem fairly-enough priced now, because supply and demand are balancing well. KE has intimated that the prices will drop because of new IOMEGA products, not competitor's products. Intel drops its CPU prices when the bigger, faster versions come out, to minimize competition by AMD & Cyrix (I wish), but only when Intel wants to, not in a panic. In the early days of hand calculators, HP models were (and still are) more expensive than TI and the newcomers, but any scientist or engineer worth his salt still either has or dreams of a HP calculator. Not to mention the HP LaserJet printers.
And one last question to this (long, I apoogize) post. Why *should* optical disks be better than magnetic media? I have floppies which I've had for 12 years which are still just as readable as the day I wrote on them. Does anyone really think that we will need to read data off an optical disk written today in 100 years, or that any of this stuff will not look like the stone-age then? Of course, they do make colorful mobiles hanging from a string, reflect pretty rainbows on the wall. |
