Dear BO,
You Said:
"There's no evidence that the removable storage market will ever grow
as large as the floppy disk did in its heyday"
I disagree. Back in 1986 (ish) when the 1.44 Floppy drive appeared on
the market, the demand was low offering only twice the capacity of
previous 720k floppies. Remeber, this is a time when Multimedia was
just a dream and files were much smaller. Today, you can barely fit
1 24-32 Bit Image on a single 1.44 floppy in a resolution geater than
640x480.
The ZIP Drive multiplies this previous capacity limitation by 70 times
and is much faster than the floppy. How long did it take for the 1.44
floppy to become a "Standard". Well, my estimation is about 5 years
or so before it appeared in 60% of the PC's in use. The Zip Drive has
only been available for about 2-3 years, the Jaz for about 1.5. I
belive this transition to Zips has already begun and will continue
for the forseeable future.
Yes, there are other competing technologies DVD, Tape, etc. However,
if my memory serves me correctly, there also existed a 2.88 MB Floppy
drive several years go. Did this catch on? No, that is because
it only provided minimal increase in removable storage capacity and
the consumers were not willing to spend the money for such a small
increase in storage. It is quite a different shift from 1.44MB to
100MB and the consumers seem to have noticed this.
"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."
I guess you don't have too many friends or need to take files from
work home with you. These are two of the "Other" reasons why
people consider buying a Zip or Jaz drive. To easily port data from
one machine to another.
With the recent (over the past 2 years) explosion of the Internet,
consumers have also realized that they collect alot of "Stuff" downloaded
from the net. Most don't have hard drives to accomodate all that
stuff and they look to external read/writable devices. Well, for
$149 bucks they have a nice solution to their storage needs.
This is in the price range of most consumers who use their PC for
getting on the net.
"The zip is *only* useful for transferring files where there is no
network and backing up small data sets."
I completely disagree here. As a software developer, I use the
Zip for backing up all the project /source code I create. At present, I
can still fit all of them on a single Zip (Ok, so most of my apps
are under 500K). I do have a Network in my home/office and the
Zip is a Shared Peer device on my network. Therefore, any machine
I am working on has easy access to the Zip (and a Jaz). It works
quite nicely for archiving, transporting and executing.
"Thus, the shorts know that Iomega has a limited upside potential.
And DVD is getting closer every day."
With each passing day, another 10,000 Zip Drives are sold. Not
including all the Disks! How long will it take for DVD to move
into the mainstream? How long will it have been that Zip and Jaz
have already serviced this demand. Rember the 2.88 MB Floppy, it
allowed more storage, but the 1.44 was the "Standard". The past
is repeating itself. Has the LS120(2.88MB metaphore) caught on?
How about the SyJet, EZ? I don't know, I'm asking...
Jon
jwagner@ro.com |
