Aus, you've outdone yourself - that was an awesome post!! Pretty much put the whole thing in perspective IMHO.
MP3, digital photography and Palm are each huge market spaces by themselves and there are thriving companies that support specific one (Napster, Photopoint, & any number of 3rd party Palm companies) - well, SanDisk supports them all.
Also, the practical uses of flash memory are virtually unlimited. This is not a product solely limited to these three applications (again, each one is huge). Portable, solid state memory will spawn a whole slew of products, some we haven't even thought of yet, and some of which could be as large or larger than the ones SanDisk is in already. What about medical monitoring, automobile performance and maintenance, charts and maps for navigation systems, books, personal digital keys & ID's, games, movies, and on and on. As capacity and cost per meg improves we will see more and more applications emerge, and IMHO, rather quickly.
This should be quite a bit different than either DRAM (not easily portable) and HDD (too big for small devices) markets in the past. Overcapacity is something that may affect the flash memory industry only temporarily.
MK |
