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Barron's Eric Savitz speaks (again)
Here is the one (out of thousands) emails that Savitz replied to:
Both the email and his response are reprinted below:
Don't Tread on Iomega
To the Editor
Instead of making plans to attend the funeral of
storage-device maker Iomega, Eric J. Savitz would be
better advised to attend a Marketing 101 course. His
recent "Plugged In" column (December 1) all but buries
Iomega because Sony and Fuji introduced a competitor
to Iomega's ubiquitous ZIP drive called the HiFD at the
latest Comdex computer trade show.
In marketing class, Savitz might learn that unseating an
entrenched leader is not easy, and that being first to
market, as Iomega is in this case, is an enormous
advantage. Iomega has already sold millions of units of
the ZIP drive and countless disks. In fact, an internal
ZIP drive is a standard feature of Sony multimedia
computers.
JEFF SCHATZ
Columbus, Ohio
Eric J. Savitz replies:
The case for the HiFD drive is obvious. To start, there's
a good chance it will replace the current 1.44 megabyte
floppy drive now shipped with almost every personal
computer. The ZIP drive, while successful, has not
achieved Iomega's goal of replacing the floppy. A floppy
with a 200-megabyte capacity, with better performance
than the ZIP, would seem to negate the need to have a
ZIP drive at all. It's that simple. |
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