Winter '98 Comdex Interview: "Syed Iftikar Is Back In Orbit With Orb"
An interview with Syed Iftikar:
westworldproductions.com
Excerpt:
SI: Why have there never been any jukeboxes for magnetic disk cartridge systems, as there are for optical disk systems? Is it because the cartridges aren't strong enough to withstand all that robotic handling?
Iftikar: It's not the cartridge; it's the disk itself. There are ruggedness and contamination issues. HDDs have traditionally used aluminum substrates—Orb media is aluminum too—and an aluminum disk is susceptible to both problems, whereas glass and polycarbonate plastic [substrates for optical disks] aren't. I'm in non-disclosure discussions about this now, but I might have more to say on the subject by next Comdex. I will say, now [Winter '98], that we're looking at alternative substrates that are more rugged and will be less susceptible to contamination than aluminum is. Those substrates might lend themselves to disk libraries for Orb.
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SI: And have you gotten any design-wins? Any notable contracts that you can identify?
Iftikar: Yes. We started by going to the Taiwan manufacturers who dominate the PC market there. Elitegroup, for example, ships 1.6 million motherboards a month. Their affiliate Proview ships large quantities of monitors. They have a strategic need for a disk drive partner and now that's Castlewood. They expect to buy more than 500,000 drives from us in 1999. For the Taiwan market alone, we forecast that two million PCs will have Orb as an OEM product—as standard equipment.
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SI: That's interesting. But on a global scale, Taiwan is a small market and those companies you mentioned aren't household names anywhere else. What happens when you want to penetrate the U.S. home market?
Iftikar: For that, we've also signed Sanyo, Aiwa, Daewoo, and Wintec as strategic partners. Together, they're capable of buying more than a million drives a year from us. Sanyo and Aiwa will also be making digital VCRs for the home market; but they're still waiting for MPEG-2 codecs [compression/decompression chipsets] to come down in price to about $35. That could happen by June [1999].
SI: Can you project your media sales too?
Iftikar: We expect, ultimately, to sell four disks for every drive, including the one that's bundled with the drive.
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SI: So who is actually manufacturing Orb?
Iftikar: We have five partners for the drives and media: Trans-Capital, in Penang; Tru-Tech, in Malaysia; Sanyo, in Japan; Daewoo, in Seoul; and Elite, which is doing the work in China because costs are lower there than in Taiwan. We also have a cartridge-only manufacturer: Mega-Media, which has plants in Taiwan, China, and Sacramento, California.
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SI: Who'll win?
Iftikar: Whoever recognizes the desirability of that price-point and shoots for it. The winners will be the ones who stick to my three rules for success: highest performance, highest quality, and lowest manufacturing cost. Plus execution: market targeting, time-to-market—just getting your product out on time. SyQuest didn't recognize that and you can see what happened.
SI: Whereas you feel that Castlewood does recognize it?
Iftikar: Castlewood absolutely heeds the warning of the handwriting on the wall. By next Comdex, we intend to be fully in line with my cost-targets and my vision.
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05/03/99:
An acquaintance of mine obtained an OEM version of this new product and has it running on his computer. It works fine, he says.
boards.fool.com
05/18/99:
Yesterday, he told me: "don't buy an Orb drive." It seems that all the data he had been storing suddenly became inaccessible. He doesn't know whether it's the media (which has been observed to be delicate) or the drive itself (I have read here that there are engineering issues involving the heads).
boards.fool.com |
