"New floppy alternatives no easy sell"
by Nancy Dillon
10/19/98
computerworld.com
Steven goldberg, manager of client systems at consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers in New York, said he would love to junk the more than 30,000 floppy drives his road warriors lug around.
...
Analysts said consultancies such as Goldberg's are among the few types of organizations expected to invest in floppy alternatives early on. Factors working against widespread corporate adoption include high price, the rise of networks and the fact that Iomega Corp.'s Zip and Jaz drives are the de facto standards in creative-services and publishing departments, which were early adopters of floppy alternatives.
...
In the larger market, adoption of high-capacity units has been slower than expected because of standards "confusion," said Jim Porter, an analyst at Mountain View, Calif.-based Disk Trend Inc.
...
Porter predicted that, in the end, the most critical technical specification in deciding the removable standard will be price.
Price is indeed the key for Ken Keala, information systems manager at Granny Goose Foods Inc. in Oakland, Calif. He recently installed a wide-area network to handle file transfers among dispersed locations, so he sees little reason to pay a premium for high-capacity floppy drives.
"If cost weren't a factor, we would of course go for a high-capacity floppy over a regular one," Keala said. "But ... we have very little use for [standard] floppy drives these days. They're just something we include because they are cheap, and we use them on occasion."
Even after prices come down, the HiFD and SuperDisk will still face difficult battles in the creative-services and prepress industries. Analysts said those groups have already moved beyond the floppy and standardized on the Zip and Jaz drives.
"To transition again would be hard, if not impossible," said Rob Pomon, network administrator at design firm Landor Associates in San Francisco.
[bold-facings and italics are not by the article's author] |
