>>SparQ has a VERY small installed base of under 100,000 drives and >>has only been on the market for 3 months. To see such a large >>number of messages on Usenet about problems this soon is a bad sign.
Were you following the Iomega threads after the Zip was introduced? I wasn't, but I wouldn't be surprised if the story was similar. It takes time for new products, knowledge of them, and familiarity with them to become widespread enough to avoid turning what would otherwise be trivial issues into public complaining. I had a minor glitch when installing the Sparq; fortunately I'd been doing this long enough to be able to track it down quickly (had to add a line to system.ini that wasn't specified in the installation instructions). I've seen a number of complaints in one ng that were solved by just that - add a line to system.ini and off you go. None of those people with the problem ever come back to say things are resolved and everything's just fine, thank you. All you ever hear about is the initial problem, and perhaps you hear about it several times over the course of a week or two before the guy finds someone with the answer.
>>In contrast, Zip has an installed base of over 12,000,000 drives >>and has been on the market for almost 3 years. There are quite a >>few messages on Usenet about problems with Zip, but FAR less (as a >>percent of installed base) than SparQ.
I guess we interpret things differently. Maybe I'm biased, but my general impression of what I read in the media and ng's concerning the Sparq has been overall positive. Lately I've been hearing more and more "click of death" and other negatively slanted stories about the Zip and Iomega. Maybe people are just tired of Iomega and are rooting for the underdog Syquest. Whatever it is, most of what I've been reading lately paints Syquest's products in a good light and Iomega's in a less favorable one. |
