It's all about time to market. If you're there, you make money until the competition catches up, then profitability on that drive generation dries up. Conner, by explicitly targeting to be late to market, guarantees losses as far as the eye can see. JTS also followed this strategy.
When Quantum came out with their time to market Fireball ST 1.6/plate drive, they had the market essentially to themselves for 6-9 months. Maxtor had the 1750, but were still ramping up to enter the big leagues at that time. WDC was futzing around with APM's TFI head and came out with a product that even management derided on conference calls. These were also the infamous drives that WDC had to increase warranty reserves for. Seagate finally had some sort of 1.6 generation drives about a year later, although these drives have never been seen in the wild. I think they just scrapped that program entirely. As I recall, Luczo said the OEMs basically told them, "You're too late. Go away. We're not going to qual you."
If Quantum can quickly ramp their new GMR drive, history may very well repeat itself. |
