Whew! Finally caught up.
A few thoughts on an amazing amount of news in a few days.
Before I went to St. Lucia, I posted a wish that Iomega would begin shipping their already-announced products before announcing any new ones. Less than a week later, I came back to find that both Ditto Max and the Notebook Zip are indeed shipping. Excellent. And I have reason to believe that Buz is not too far behind. Not this month, and possibly not next, but certainly by January.
Also, it looks like n.hand will be announced as a real product, with good OEM support from several sectors. Not just digital cameras, but PDAs, etc. Excellent. And there's even the possibility of a name change to something other than n.hand. That, too, would be excellent news.
Quest drive: Sounds fine, but has some features that will limit it to being a niche product. First, the 5.25" disk means that the device will only be external. Second, UltraWide SCSI interfaces are rare. Yes, they are becoming more prevalent, but look at it like this: All Macs have SCSI interfaces, but the overwhelming majority are not UltraWide. The majority of PCs don't have SCSI at all, and those which do have it mostly don't have the UltraWide variety. Thus only a small minority of existing computers can use the Quest drive. Still, the higher-end machines on which one might want a Quest are the ones most likely to have UW SCSI. Should sell some units, for sure.
Orb: Also available as SCSI only, but usable on almost all SCSI-equipped machines. This is a good thing for Mac users who wanted SparQ, but didn't have IDE or parallel support. So now, SparQ and Orb can split part of the market. That is, if anyone trusts a product from Castlewhatever. Dumb name for a tech company, and of course, they are completely unknown.
Micron announcement: Great news. This event follows the pattern that was seen when the 3.5" disk replaced the 5.25". Now we need to see other manufacturers follow suit.
Symantec Norton Utils tie-in: Completely great. A synergistic relationship between Iomega and Symantec developing. Another indication of the acceptance of Zip as a standard.
KE sells some shares for the first time. Well, we were warned that he would do so two conference calls ago. Still holds most of his shares. Not a significant thing, IMO.
Rocky still bearish and predicting the demise of Iomega: It's good to see that some things don't change.
Thanks, all, for taking such good care of the situation while I was away.
- Allen |
