Dennis, thanks for the update and the heads up on Barrons article. Yes, you will find quite a bit of discussion over on the IOM thread here on SI as well as over on the Motley Fool site. The article is quite biased against Iomega, but what else is new about how Barrons views this company. Yes, this is serious competition for the Zip drive and IOM, but in a few days, Iomega is going to announce that they have shipped over 11 Million Zip drives (at a rate nearing about 1 Million drives per month). By the time Sony comes up with their "Iomega Killer" we will have between 20 to 25 million of them lil' Blue Boxes and internal EOM drives out there and UPTEEN MILLIONS OF ZIP DISKS! The margin IS in the DISKS! The ol Gillette razor model! Not to say the new Sony drive will have some effect on the market and likely on the price of the stock when it comes on the market, but for now it is pretty much Vaporware. I have great confidence that IOM CEO, Kim Edwards, has a few trump cards up his sleeve to counter this new drive. I know that last year they said that they have a 200 MB drive working in the lab and now showing what they can do with the new Clik! drive/disk system (40 MB on a disk the size of a silver dollar) then I would imagine that they could even cram another 50 to 100 MBs on the yet to be announced high density Zip. So we shall see what develops. I do know I will have twice as many shares of IOM by Christmas and another 50% more RAIN after the New Year!
The Fools were on the radio yesterday and pretty much dismissed the Barrons article as being written by someone who just doesn't understand the Removable Storage industry. There are a bunch of products that have been proclaimed "Zip Killers" but they have gone nowhere. This will be a blowout quarter for IOM, so am looking forward to some good movement in the stock price before the split. Hopefully, we will see the 40s before the split??!!
By the way, just went out and bought a cheapo parallel port scanner and a high res. HP Deskjet printer (HP 890C) so will be playing with my new toys even before Santa gets here. Warm thoughts form Panama...Mel, Kathy and Sparks. (Take a look at the IOM thread on the Motley Fool internet site for a few laughs regarding the manager of the "Sparky Fund"!) |
