Roger & Z,
RE: High end troubles. M. Brown seemed to me to say that no one knows where this shuffle is going right now--the "structural changes" that he said were going on were going to continue at least through the next quarter and possibly longer. He (or someone) said things might get worse before they get better there, at least for Quantum. QNTM seems to be pinning their high end hopes on the Atlas 3 and Viking 2 drives to ship in March quarter--Brown appeared to say something like they were disappointed with their current drives, although perhaps I was reading that in.
IMO, we can't come down too hard on SEG for this mess. In hindsight, it was almost inevitably a mess--too many players coming in at once trying get share, customers want them to get share, but their products aren't quite there yet. Plus the dual transitions of going off allocation and going into JIT all at once. It's easy to blame SEG for lacking the foresight to cut their production in time, but it seems to me that they would have had to be "peeking at the cards" to really get it right. Not that they didn't make mistakes, but the mistakes were easy ones to make, and hard ones to avoid.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm married to Al.
Sam |
