steve, (Long post, sorry) as a pragmatist, any new technology which might affect Iomega concerns me. Perhaps the new 4.7 GB cartridge will only have a few dozen sales, perhaps a few tens of thousands, I don't know. The Jaz doesn't seem to be making a lot of visible excitement out there, so mabye these are just niche products, mabye not.
The uproar about super high capacity removables seems to be their capability to hold whole movie-length videos, so perhaps the market is the "5000-channel movie-on-demand" stuff which was talked up so much a little while ago. Certainly if the DVD players are fast enough to serve up a movie, these huge hard disks should be able to serve up the same movie to multiple consumers at overlapping times. Thus, the market may be for only a relatively few machines, but a bunch of drives for each machine.
My concern, though, is that if SyQuest, which used to dominate the removable storage market, is able to significantly and repeatedly one-up Iomega on technology issues at reasonable price points, then the tables might be turned once again.
It's quite possible that the Zip is going to be the only one of these products which is able to penetrate the mass markets and make terabucks, but it would be a mistake for Iomega to start giving the impression that the company is falling behind the power curve (for power users).
All of the above is certainly IMHO. Any forward-looking statements will probably need bifocals and/or a Boy Scout to help them across the street.
Cameron
Cheops' Law: "Nothing ever gets built on time or within budget." |
