Ok, how about this (I'm a mild bear on Iomega):
1) There's no evidence that the removable storage market will ever grow as large as the floppy disk did in its heyday. The floppy disk became preeminent when it was the only game in town, now, CD's, networks, hard drives(!) and tape storage perform many of the functions *previously* done by the floppy disk. For most people, the only use for a floppy drive is as an emergency boot mechanism if the hard drive fails, as well as to read old floppy disks that are still around. Thus, people who think that the zip will replace the floppy disk are fooling themselves, since the floppy disk has already been replaced by CDs for program installation, networks for transfer, and tape storage for backups. The zip is not competitive against CDs, networks, or tape storage for these items and thus will not be used in their stead. The zip is *only* useful for transferring files where there is no network and backing up small data sets. This is a much smaller market than the original floppy disk commanded.
As far as the people who claim that Zip is "already a standard," well, that just proves my point. If 7 million drives makes a standard, then the potential market can't really be that big.
Thus, the shorts know that Iomega has a limited upside potential. And DVD is getting closer every day.
Howzat? |
