High-flyer turned kamikaze?
By Charles Cooper, ZDNN
February 20, 1998 4:56 PM PST
Iomega, one of highest-flying stocks of 1997, is fast losing altitude.
Shares of Iomega (IOM), which traded as high as $16.75 in early December, closed the week at $8.75 as the storage maker got socked with another class action lawsuit Friday.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of purchasers of Iomega's common stock, charges company officials with issuing false and misleading statements to inflate the price of the firm's stock. Iomega dismissed the allegations, but after enjoying the kind of 1997 that PR professionals can only dream about, the company now finds itself wrestling with the public relations year from hell.
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PC WEEK, Februrary 16, 1998
According to many reports from users, Click Death is a particularly nasty infestation that can ruin your Zip disks. It can spread from disk to disk and even bring your drive to its knees.
Click Death happens when an Iomega Zip drive starts emitting a sharp clicking noise when accessing a Zip disk. For Zip drives, that's the death knell.
Got valuable data on that Zip disk? Too bad, because most people who encounter this click end up with unreadable disks.
Even worse, it appears that after disks have been trashed by Click Death, using them in other drives can destroy those drives as well. Whatever happens inside a stricken Zip disk apparently destroys other pristine Zip drive heads--a vicious circle of destruction.
The only solution is to kiss your valuable data goodbye and replace your Zip drive.
How does Click Death happen? No one seems to know. Even Iomega couldn't provide any useful information. But there are almost as many theories as there are victims.
If you've got valuable backups on Zip, better copy them to something else soon.
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From PC Magazine,
February 10, 1997
The Fight to Be the New Floppy Disk
By John C. Dvorak
So along comes Sony--inventor of the 3.5-inch drive--with an upgrade: the HiFD disk drive. Also a 3.5-inch drive, the HiFD is 240MB unformatted, 200MB formatted--about twice the capacity of the Zip and LS-120 drives. With full backward compatibility, the HiFD appears to be the immediate "I want that!" drive people will flock to. It steps right over the current Zip and LS-120 drive market for about the same price, and it also destroys the 230MB optical drive market, forcing those folks to move to the 600MB-plus arena, where they should have moved years ago. The 230MB SyQuest EZ Flyer and other small-capacity, removable systems will be dead meat. The HiFD drive also works at hard disk speed, finally taking the 3.5-inch drive off the bottleneck list.
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Ok here's what I'm paranoid about, every week for the last three we have had major editorials against Iomega.
Are these guys neutralizing our 100 mil ad effort ??
All Ziff-Davis Publishing.
I guess I'm working a little to hard at it I'm taking a break.
See ya all later.
Good luck
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