RE: The StuporDisk Campaign
Allen and all,
Nice post, Allen. Your perceptions at PC Expo were
substantially the same as mine. One place where we
differ was in the action at the Imation booth (which,
for those of you who didn't attend, was tucked up
in the northwest corner of the main floor, and
about half the size of the Iomega booth). I saw
a good bit of action there when I went by, which
was about 1 p.m. on Wednesday. They had some kind
of "instant-winner" prize drawing, in which you let
them swipe your ID badge and then you stepped up to
a person just a bit farther and found out if you were
one of the winners of some kind of freebie. (I THINK
the freebie was an LS-120 drive of some sort, but
I didn't have time to check and didn't care much
what it was.) Anyway, this promotion was very,
very popular. There was a line about fifty people
long waiting to participate, and it wrapped halfway
around their booth. There's clearly some interest
and curiosity out there for this product, and
Imation is pushing hard to cultivate that.
For those of you old-timers, this accords exactly
with what I was saying about September 1996 or
thereabouts--about the time when I couldn't figure
out who was and was not behind the Panasonic brand
name <red-faced grin>. It was clear at that time
that there would come a time when there would be
a publicity blitz for the LS-120. Now you're
seeing it. Page 9 of the business section of
Wednesday's _New York Times_ was a full-page
ad for the StuporDisk. I was wrong, though, in
guessing that Panasonic would be behind the blitz.
The identification in the ad is from Imation, which
is prominently described as "Borne of 3M Innovation."
(Note, significantly, that Compaq's name is nowhere
to be found in all such plugging for the LS-120.)
You'll see a bunch of StuporDisk promos in the coming
weeks and months, I suspect. They're not going to
give up without a fight, and unlike Syquest, they
have deep enough pockets to stage a credible media
blitz.
Surely some will be swayed by that blitz. Will it
be enough to unseat Iomega? If the StuporDisk were
better technically, and if the Zip weren't this
entrenched already, I'd say yes. Very quickly,
though, as those who are curious but not yet in
the know start to explore this product, it'll become
clear that this device is so glacially slow that
it's impractical. Their little performance
comparison there in the Imation booth pitted
an uncached parallel port Zip against a cached
internal LS-120 and, surprise surprise, the LS-120
was a tad faster. This is like racing a Volkswagen
Beetle in high gear against a Corvette in first.
Such a demo will take in some customers, and the
backwards-compatibility feature will take in a
few more who want that badly for some odd reason
or other. And full-page ads in national newspapers
will take in some more in the same way that such
hype gets at least some people to go see lousy
movies. Sooner or later, though, the reviews
of the lousy movies come in and the word gets
around, and they turn into box-office underperformers.
Or, to return to the automobile analogy, some people
bought the Yugo, but it's now history, whereas Honda
started out similarly, but with a better product,
and they made it.
So, expect to see Imation make some gains over the
next few months, but I'm now pretty confident that
it'll be a transition species with a short time on
this earth before it becomes extinct. Reinforcing
this impression was the O.R. booth, where the
A: Drive was being flogged. The booth was a tiny
little affair over on the south end of the main
floor, in an area that my wife and I jokingly refer
to as "the slums" as we wander through it, and there
wasn't much action there. If that display is any
indicator, then unlike Imation, they don't have
the legs to attract any OEMs, and they won't last
long.
It's therefore my opinion that the wise observers
can comfortably leave Syquest (the no-show), the
A: Drive, and even LS-120 behind. The new worry,
as others have said, is Avatar's Shark. They
had a modest little booth, and it's clear that
they won't be getting a lot of OEMs real soon,
but their product is technically sweet and
attractively packaged, so I think it'll capture
its share of the aftermarket crowd. That may
eat up a little of Iomega's business there, but
of course this was only Iomega's entry point, and
now the real issue for Iomega is the OEM base.
If Iomega continues to penetrate the OEM base,
especially if the laptop Zip from VST appears
in big numbers in September (which everyone
at PC Expo was guaranteeing in very emphatic
terms), then the Shark will face an increasingly
bothersome compatibility challenge and will become
a niche product only. There's also the question
of price, and there Iomega has them beat, especially
if it continues the Model T strategy. Still, it
remains to be seen just how much damage the Shark
will do to Iomega's aftermarket business, and there
could be a hit there. (Note: the preceding
sentence added, first, because I'm a considered
long rather than a rabid long, and second, because
I wanted to give Rocky something juicy to quote
out of context. <grin>)
In any event, Allen, other than my observation of
that population surge midday Wednesday at the Imation
booth, you and I read the show about the same. I'm
sorry we didn't run into each other. We should have
set up an "SI get-together" at the Iomega booth on
a certain day at a certain time. Maybe next year
we can do it, and we can get Iomega to send Tim
Hill or somebody similar to come shake our hands.
And Rocky can drop over and make a nifty video
of us all and then go home and edit it on a
Syquest drive. <devilish grin> (Sorry, Rocky,
I couldn't help myself. Go ahead and tease me
back about something in retaliation. I deserve
it.)
More later.
Cheers, Tom (long IOM) |
