All -
Warning: This post is long and technical, but it is written in plain english.
I've started to become annoyed again about the knocks Iomega takes for its supposedly inferior technology. I believe Iomega's technology is the equal of any of their competitors'.
I have a few observations about that technology, and the fallacies of the attacks on it.
Attack #1: Zip is based on outdated floppy technology.
Zip was introduced in 1995. It uses flexible media in a durable shell. However, the particular way Zip's heads are designed is quite clever. They allow the Zip to meet design the following design goals:
1, to provide 100MB of storage in removable cartridges which were inexpensive to manufacture
2, to provide data transfer rates higher than any flexible media based system had before in order to allow for reasonable performance
3, to provide for data security by making the disk cartridges durable enough for daily use
4, to provide a total system which could be manufactured and sold profitably for less than one hundred dollars, once certain volumes were reached.
Zip meets those design goals. NO OTHER PRODUCT before or since has done so.
LS-120 fails on data transfer rates, and is more expensive to manufacture. And don't forget that LS-120 probably would never have been developed without the involvement of Iomega engineers. Iomega dropped the LS-120 technology because they had a better idea.
If Sony ever really manages to get HiFD out the door it will be more than three years after Zip was introduced. Would that mean that Sony has a better grasp of technology? I submit that it's much easier to improve an existing product than to create an entirely new product category, so the answer has to be no.
EZ-135 and EZ-Flyer were faster, but too expensive to manufacture. The use of rigid media disks for those products had more disadvantages than advantages, especially in terms of durability and cost. In no way can these devices be said to be more technically advanced than Zip simply because of the rigid media. Winchester technology is almost as old as floppy technology. Where's the big advance in using it?
Attack #2: SyJet is bigger and faster than Jaz.
In fact, SyJet does have 50% greater capacity than Jaz, and it is slightly faster. Not a whole lot faster, but the advantage is there.
But does that mean that SyQuest has better engineers than Iomega? Hardly. Iomega introduced Jaz more than a year before SyQuest delivered SyJet. Again, it's a lot easier to take someone else's design and improve it slightly than it is to come up with the initial design. The technologies involved are virtually identical. Both drives use Winchester-type read/write heads. Both use thin-film rigid disk media. There is nothing in SyJet that represents a clear technical advantage over Jaz, nor is there even anything original in its design. SyJet is basically a slightly improved copy of the Jaz design.
And the biggest point in Jaz's favor in this comparison is that Jaz can be sold profitably at price points identical to SyJet's, while SyQuest is losing money on each drive they sell. This would appear to indicate that Iomega's manufacturing processes are more efficient. (Or maybe Iomega's manufacturing volumes are just so much higher that they save by buying parts in bulk. It is true that Jaz sales for 1997 were up more than 50% over '96.)
Attack #3: Iomega still doesn't have any products that use MR heads, while SyQuest does.
In fact, to be perfectly accurate, SyQuest doesn't yet. Quest is not yet shipping.
But even assuming that it will ship, it doesn't really mean that SyQuest "has better technology." MR heads were developed in the 80s, and not by SyQuest. Their use in a removable cartridge disk drive would be a first, but not really a breakthrough. It is just a logical extension of existing designs.
Iomega could certainly have chosen to develop a Quest-like drive. They had good reasons not to. First, they wanted to make Jaz2 compatible with Jaz. That meant sticking with thin-film media. Second, I believe that their market research told them that five gig drives weren't going to be much more than a niche product for the next few years, especially since PCs running Windows and Windows 95 can't access drive partitions larger than 2GB. (Except for the few systems running Win 95 OSR2 and using FAT32.)
Attack #4: Iomega's products are unreliable.
The fact is that some percentage of any mass produced item will prove defective, either out of the box or down the road. My personal experience with Iomega's products indicates that the defect rates for them are lower than average.
If you total every single newsgroup report ever, and even if you don't subtract all the problems caused by user error or other factors not within Iomega's control, you will still come up with a number that is a very small percentage of the number of Zip and Jaz drives sold.
Word of mouth is the single biggest factor affecting product sales. Iomega simply would not have sold over 12 million Zips and over 1 million Jaz drives if the majority of people who bought them were dissatisfied.
I know Rocky will bring up the Roland story if he has a long enough attention span to have gotten this far. I don't claim to know all the facts about that. No one, including Rocky, has ever presented them. But anyone who knows anything about SCSI devices and controllers knows that disks formatted on different systems will not always be interchangeable. I understand that many of the problems with the Roland devices involved taking Jaz disks from a Roland unit and trying to read it on a Jaz connected to something else, or vice versa. If anyone has any facts to present on this topic, I'd love to hear them. (That's "facts," Rocky, which means that it can't be a conclusion or a supposition.)
Finally, I will say this. If Zip was such an easy thing to produce, why has no one been able come up with something to beat it in three years?
To anyone who read this whole thing. Thank you. I hope it was worth it to you. I just had to get these things off my chest.
Iomega is not just a marketing machine. Their products work and work well for their intended purposes.
Iomega technology rules. I invite anyone to read this post and give me a good reason to think otherwise.
- Allen |
