let's remember what people were saying about iomega's up and comming competion in 1996. HAHAHAHAHAHA, read how the analyst predicted that pc makers would rally behind the ls-120 and make it the standard.
( 06/19/96 12:00:00 AM)
Iomega meets its match
Justin Hibbard
Reigning removable-storage king Iomega Corp. met new rivals for the
throne at PC Expo Tuesday. Iomega, whose Zip drives have been
popular enough to make the company's stock one of the hottest in
the U.S. in the last year, is trying to make its technology a de
facto industry standard. To that end, it introduced a 15mm internal
Zip drive for notebook PCs. Due out in the first quarter of 1997,
the drive will work in today's notebooks, and Iomega is pursuing
OEM partnerships with notebook manufacturers to offer the drive
factory-installed in new laptops, said Timothy Hill, Iomega's vice
president of worldwide marketing. Iomega has not yet announced a
price for the drive. But competing aggressively against the Zip
disk is the Laser Servo 120, a 120M-byte floppy disk that comes in
the same casing as the current 1.44M-byte floppy disk standard.
Maxell Corp. of America and Mitsubishi Electric Corp. Tuesday
announced they will build LS120 drives, while 3M Corp. worked the
PC Expo floor to promote its version of the disk. Meanwhile, at a
meeting sponsored by Bear, Stearns & Co. in New York Tuesday, hard
drive manufacturer Western Digital Corp. presented its entrant in
the removable-storage race. The company plans to ship in September
a 10.5mm, 1G-byte removable hard drive priced at $200 for notebooks
and desktops. In a press conference at PC Expo, Iomega CEO Kim
Edwards dismissed the idea that Western Digital's new product
competes with the Zip drive. She said a hard drive is in a
different product category than a removable-cartridge drive. But
Bill Dobbs, an analyst at HPB Associates in New York, disagreed.
"It still competes," he said. "The hard drive is kind of the gold
standard as far as speed and reliability goes." Nevertheless, he
expects PC makers will line up behind the LS120 as the standard for
removable storage. " [PC makers] say that backward compatibility is
key for them," Dobbs said. Most LS120 floppy drives have an extra
head that can read and write to 1.44M-byte disks, paving a smooth
migration path for users with a backlog of data on 1.44M-byte
disks.
Iomega's drives are not backward-compatible.
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