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Non-Tech : The New Iomega '2000' Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rocky Reid who wrote (848)	6/19/1999 11:59:00 PM
From: FruJu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5023

But the profit margins will be razor thin compared to Jaz. This event is a watershed because it signals that Iomega Management sees the end of Zip and Jaz within sight. They might even have internal timetable estimates as to how sales will decrease. Rocky, do you think that the end of Zip and Jaz is an indictment of removable magnetic storage in general, or just of Iomega in general? I sort of see the market for removable storage moving in two opposite directions. At the low end, flash memory cards seem to be dominating the consumer camera market and may well dominate the handheld/Jupiter WinCE class devices. It's small, rugged (no moving parts), and rapidly coming down in price. At the high end, people either just buy 30GB UltraATA hard drives and install them in empty bays at $0.10/MB, or if they need to keep a permanent backup or exchange large files, they'll use a CD-R or CD-RW since it's interchangeable with any existing machine with a CD-ROM drive out there. I don't know that there's really a market for the old "removable cartridge" type model of business. I wonder how this will impact ORB for example? There's still the "X" factor of Clik! at the low end, but like the analyst quoted earlier, Iomega has just screwed up on delivery and execution. How long has it been since they announced nHand? 2 years? 3 years? Where has all that R&D money been going since then? If Clik! were shipping in volume this time last year, I believe we would have seen at least some penetration into the digital camera market.

To: Rocky Reid who wrote (848)	6/20/1999 1:19:00 AM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5023

All - Contrary to what some people seem to believe, an Iomega CD-RW will not be the company's first commodity-type product. The Ditto line mostly consisted of QIC tape drives. QIC tape drives were made by many different companies. Iomega got out of that business because the consumer tape market was drying up. However, Ditto drives maintained a healthy market share for the past several years. There is more competition in the CD-RW business, but that doesn't mean that Iomega can't pick up a healthy share of that market. I don't get why anyone would say that CD-RW drive margins will be thin compared with Jaz. Iomega has said that Jaz has been losing money. That would tend not to support the assumption that Jaz margins were all that great. BTW, I notice that some people are assuming that the plug is being pulled on the entire Jaz line based on some posts made on The Fool board. I haven't seen an announcement to that effect yet, so I'm not buying it. I think it's more likely that they'll kill Jaz, but keep making Jaz2. I don't know if Iomega will ever make money again, and I am certainly not recommending the stock or trying to put a positive spin on the current situation. But I abhor the bone-picking atmosphere that tends to come over this board at times like this. - Allen