Tom, all -
I thought I'd make a some observations about PC Expo, too.
Iomega's presence was huge. The booth was large and prominently located, as you indicated, Tom. There was also a billboard sized yellow object sitting right in front of the entrance, touting Buz. Of course, the now familiar yellow Iomega bags were everywhere.
I heard people talking about Jaz and Zip drives all over the show, not just in the Iomega booth. Overheard one guy in the Micron booth say to another, ". . .and they all come with Zip drives built in now. Pretty cool."
Iomega employees to whom I spoke all seemed very upbeat, optimistic and even excited. The mood there was the same as it was two years ago at the Expo. That was when I first started thinking about buying stock.
One employee was sorry to hear my report that the stock was up again today. (This was in the morning. I had seen an early quote before going to the Expo, when it was up a dollar.) He said, "Well, of course that's good for you. But I had a buy order in early last week at 18. Then the next time I looked it was over 20."
I verified that he was not trying to exercise options, he just wanted to buy stock on the open market. Sure, he could have just been blowing smoke, but I didn't get that impression at all. He said that there would be "a lot of new stuff" between now and the end of the year.
BTW, a product manager for n.hand said that the n.hand had been reduced from using 5 volts to 3.3.
Buz looks like a pretty nifty package, especially for 199. There was a display showing the Buz connector box, with a Jaz drive playing a video clip at 30 fps.
The mood in the Panasonic/Imation booth was quite different. Not as much traffic, and not as much energy from the employees. To be fair, though, I must say that I noticed a fair amount of interest in the LS-120 in their booth and in the Exabyte booth.
One guy in the Panasonic booth was grilling an employee about performance, citing test results reported in the press. The Panasonic guy said he didn't know about any third party testing, but directed the questioner to a demo display they had going comparing real-time performance between the LS-120 (with caching software) and the parallel-port Zip. The LS-120 was slightly quicker in that demo, naturally. The plucky interragator wasn't buying it, though. He wanted to talk about IDE LS-120 vs. IDE or SCSI.
There were also parallel-port LS-120s on display. Going for 200 bucks with a fifty dollar rebate, apparently. No performance demos with those.
- Allen |
