Good summary of disk drive woes contained in Moody's downgrade of RDRT debt:
<<Read-Rite's disk drive heads manufacturing has remained under pressure from the industry's rapid platform transitions, facilitated by a virtual annual doubling in areal density over the past three years.
Such strides in increased storage capacity were not accompanied by a commensurate growth in application software complexity, enabling disk drives designed with head stack assemblies containing fewer magnetic recording heads and fewer individual media disks to satisfy the storage requirements of a substantial proportion of the desktop personal computer market.
The advent of the sub-$1,000 and, more recently, sub-$500 priced personal computers has additionally led to pressures on the bill of materials (BOM) used to manufacture personal computers.
As disk drives now comprise, even more so than the sub-$1,000 class microprocessors, the highest expense items in the BOM, they have been targeted in the inexorable price cutting regimes of the personal computer OEMs, with the price pressures devolving from the drives themselves down to the various components that are assembled into the drives.>>
Nothing new to the veterans....
Excellent articles on PC/appliance design, electronic books, DVD recorders struggling and Sony's change of heart (important in the PVR Space):
telegraph.co.uk
pc.ibm.com
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
Some on topic, some off,
Paul |
