>>The only reason Iomega is where it is at is because of marketing. You can't honestly tell me that the Iomega product is better. Sure Syquest was sleeping but now they are awake and want back what Iomega took. I think Iomega knows this because now they are against the wall
and they must do what ever they can to dis-credit Syquest.<<
Mario -
I do not believe that Iomega has gotten to where it is solely because of marketing. Marketing is important, but unless the product is right, it doesn't catch on.
Over 7 million Zips have been sold. One of the main reasons is that people buy them, like them, and recommend to their friends.
I can honestly say that I think ALL the Iomega products are just fine. The Zip, while slower than the EZ Flyer, is also less expensive to manufacture. Why send a hard disk to do a floppy disk's job?
At this point, I don't see how Syquest has Iomega up against the wall. The bulk of Iomega's revenues come from Zip. Syquest has essentially conceded that end of the market to them. Ditto accounts for another 10% of Iomega sales. No competition from Syquest there.
The only place where these two companies compete at all any more is with SyJet and Jaz. Over 1 million Jaz drives have been sold so far. If you check with retailers, they will tell you that Jaz is outselling SyJet by a wide margin.
Is SyJet a better product than Jaz? Maybe slightly. Though it is higher capacity, it was introduced a year after Jaz. To increase data density by 50% was not difficult. Is it faster? Maybe slightly. Is it more reliable? You can find stories about SyJet failures on the Internet as easily as you can find stories about Jaz failures. And it looks like the Jaz stories are older. Again, I point to the more than one million Jaz drives sold. If they never worked, people wouldn't be recommending them to each other.
I have owned a Jaz drive for more than a year now, and have had no problems. I know dozens of people who use them without problems. To be fair, I must admit that I also know a small group of Mac users who report that they had problems with the initial batch of Jaz disks that they got about a year ago. However, they have not had problems since.
But whether the SyJet is better or not, the real point is that Jaz only accounts for a small percentage of Iomega's sales, and it is the only product with which Syquest competes at all. How does that supposedly motivate Iomega to mount an unfounded lawsuit? If Syquest has not infringed Iomega's patents, then suing them would only discredit Iomega when the court makes its finding. Do you really believe that Iomega would bring this suit if they didn't believe they were going to win it? That they are suing just to harass Syquest?
- Allen |
