Well, I think I may have unintentionally conveyed the wrong info yesterday. Z, you were right, DSS will ramp with qualification units in early CY00. They will volume ramp for end user delivery, they hope, in mid-00. I got a call today from another rep at DSS, who asked me if I had any questions about SDLT, and I asked her specifically about this. I wasn't really expecting the call, and didn't have other questions ready for her, although she said that she probably couldn't answer them anyway because they are in their quiet period (they haven't decided when they will release earnings yet, sometime in mid-Oct). I suspect she was trying to clear up the above confusion. She claimed that this has been their timeline all along. Well, it's possible, perhaps I misunderstood her in earlier conversations last spring.
As for the "unresolved issues" that you keep referring to: frankly, there could easily be unresolved issues for everyone concerned with this inflection point in tape drives. Do you think that LTO will get everything right out of the chute? Or Exabyte for that matter? The questions you have about SDLT could easily be asked about them as well. We'll have to see how it turns out. |
