Ken,
Some very interesting assertions. I do, however, have some comments and some questions.
Under your JAZ category you said,
This is a high end 'luxury' peripheral, with many to choose from in this space: ORB, CDR/W, DVD, high end optical devices, and probably the largest trend: High Availability central mass storage. I just cannot see a business with every desktop having a Jaz!
You won't get an argument out me on the "luxury" statement. I've previously said that the Jaz drive is strictly for power users and certain professionals who feel they even have a need for such a high capacity drive. I have a Jaz drive but I don't consider myself an average user. I back up my entire C and D hard drive partitions weekly to two separate Jaz disks, taking less than an hour for each partition. I do this out of fear of another hard drive crash...yes hard drives do crash....two crashes in three years but you don't see me trashing Western Digital or Quantum. As a matter of fact the only component failure I've had since buying my current machine in April 1996.
I've also said I believe the Jaz drive is a niche product because of it's high capacity as evidenced by the fact that only a little over 2 million have been sold since it's introduction.
If Iomega were betting the company's very survival on just such a high capacity drive I wouldn't be invested in Iomega. Syquest found out....there just isn't a sufficiently high demand for such capacity now or perhaps ever, whereas their is a massive demand for a simple, inexpensive, easy to use Zip drive (22 million and counting) which, for now, is Iomega's primary source of income.....period.
What does this say about Orb? First ask someone from Syquest (if you can find someone) and see what they have to say about it.
Under your ZIP category you said,
It also hasn't proven better reliability than any of these methods. (one of my two ZIPS died, others at work have complained, don't forget CLIK! of death). It also is expensive when compared to the floppy.
My original parallel port Zip drive was purchased in April 1996 and has never skipped a beat nor corrupted any data. I recently sold that drive to a friend (this makes 5 Zip drives he now owns for his business and home) and bought an external SCSI Zip drive and added it to my SCSI chain along with my Jaz drive which I purchased in October 1996 (which has also never given me any trouble).
Not trying to make excuses here but I and others suspect the "click of death" afflicts drives manufactured in the very late 1996 to late 1997 time frame because of quality issues accompanying Iomega's "get it out at any cost" situation because of the high demand. Iomega has officially stated that the "click of death" affected less than 0.5 % of Zip drives and will replace any such drives free of charge no matter how far they are out of the one year warranty. Further, Iomega has said in the last couple of conference calls that customer complaints are way down as Jim Sierk focused on quality issues for the better part of 1998.
It still isn't unusual for me to pick a floppy disk up that I haven't accessed for awhile and get a "disk error" message, while I've never encountered such a message from a Zip disk in three years now. Am I just lucky? I don't think so. I have another friend with over 40 Zip disks and he's never had a problem in over two years now.
Under your CLIK! category you said,
DOA. period. This is the messiah of the bulls. They always point to this as having as much potential as the ZIP, but again, ignore all the data contradicting this. This is a clunky, fragile, power hog which no one in their right minds would dream of putting in a low-end consumer product. This would likely triple the part count! Including this device as standard kills the factory cost of any low end device. Simple... Why would an OEM double+ the factory cost of a PDA? Cell phone? Camera? This does NOT make one bit of sense.
If you really believe this, why did you say the following in your year 1999 and 2000 earnings prediction post:
Note big jump in Q4 1999. This is Clik! realy kicking in. (500,000 units in that quarter). That would be quite a feat!
Also, why did you estimate $2.2 billion in revenues for 2000 when I only estimated $2.0 billion in revenues for the same period. Where is all that revenue going to come from if the Clik! drive is DOA? Did you have some other yet to be announced product in mind?
Dave
p.s. Right or wrong, I put a lot of thought and hours into my spreadsheet and summaries for my Iomega 1999 and 2000 revenue and earnings predictions and so far haven't seen anything to change my mind. Besides, as far as I'm concerned they are all written in stone now. There comes a time when you just have to place your bet and see what happens....this is one of those times.
p.p.s Please don't take any of this as being critical...I'm just trying to understand where you are coming from.
|
