Sam,
I am in Vegas but not to attend Comdex. I am primarily here to attend the Head/Media Review sponsored by the publishers of Data Storage Magazine. It is a two day symposium held at the Stardust Hotel each year just before the opening of Comdex and this year's event closed last night. To be honest with you, after several meetings here today I will beat an exit from Vegas (which is not my favorite place in any case) without wading into the booths at Comdex. Some of you may find this odd but the fact is that I have never found much value in walking around the show until my back breaks and my feet blister. Back in the days I did do this I always collected tons of literature that I almost never looked at again and had trouble finding space enough for in my baggage. It is all just too much and is all presented with so much hype and noise that it is very difficult and time consuming to sort wheat from chaff.
As to the symposium, that is another story. There were several presentations that were noteworthy and a complete report is too lengthy for this forum. Those who wish, may PM me for a more detailed commentary which I will be doing in the next week or so and will eMail to regulars on the thread. But for now I wanted to comment on the Comdex article you linked. In it was this:
<<``I don't know if they have heard the first shot of the digital appliance revolution,' said John Dodge, editor of PC Week. ``The PC isn't dead. I think the discussion of whether the PC is dead, is dead. The PC will be with us a long time.'>>
I could not agree more with this statement, and would add that here on this thread we have discussed non-traditional disk drive applications quite a bit. However, the numbers I saw this past week-end suggests that the emergence of those applications will actually have little impact on disk drive shipments in the very near term. A forecast shown by Dataquest has it this way in terms of total % of DD shipments:
Non PC disk drive shipments (excluding servers)
1999 - 1.1% of a total 167M drives
2000 - 3.8% " " " " 191.2M "
2001 - 9.5% " " " " 224.7M "
2002 - 12.7% " " " "268.3M "
(Courtesy of John Monroe, Chief Analyst, Disk Drives, Dataquest)
Simple arithmetic suggests that PCs and servers will still be the largest drivers of the DD market for the near future. Of the new non-traditional applications that are emerging Dataquest noted digital audio and video as the most important (no surprises here). Note: both the non- traditional usage AND the overall numbers above still represent attractive growth in demand.
So where does this lead us? Well, we still have industry consolidation to talk about but I am suspect of that dubious panacea. For one thing, even if a WDC or a Samsung, or whoever, goes away what prevents the survivors from simply repeating their delinquent behavior and ramping up to fill whatever small void is left?
I think we have to talk more about (and understand better) the "other" enterprises our beloved and belaboured DD companies have underway. A quick inventory of these activities favors Seagate in my opinion. Not to toot my own horn but apparently the market of late has been saying so as well. I am glad I did not wait until Seagate hit 24-25 to accumulate in any case.
Best,
Stitch |
