You make two good points. I was speaking as a consumer, not an IOM investor, which I am not, currently.
Concerning point one, I wish IOM would tell us what the media costs them. I also believe they should license the disks as well as the drives, and collect royalties - something more than one bull here has said would not be as profitable as keeping it all to themselves. IMO, we have already experienced the results of doing it the "more profitable" way. It would be interesting to see if the "less profitable" licensing staunched the flow of red ink.
Concerning point two, if Zip disks were $1-$2, demand would definitely pick up and probably explode. If Zip became the standard, then over 50M drives would be sold every year, and probably 5-10 disks with every drive. I say 5-10 because just as work tends to fill up the time available to do it, larger disk capacity seems to foster apps with greater storage needs. I doubt that would change just because the medium is called "Zip". At $10/disk, only high priority stuff gets zipped. At $1-$2/disk, anything and everything would get zipped. Thus the greater demand.
Still, all of this is a lot to hope for, and the probability of it happening gets lower every day. Their ponderous pace of development doesn't give me a warm feeling of confidence that they can turn it around soon. They really do need a good helmsman again, like KE was in the beginning. I fear they have lost so much credibility, they will not be able to attract the kind of CEO they need without giving away half the store in stock options. They have too many shares outstanding as it is. |
