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Technology Stocks : DSS: DLT finally open for trading -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (92)	10/13/1999 8:17:00 PM
From: Will Cunningham	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 488

Sam, I listened to the Exabyte conference call and found the CEO extremely boring. He droned on and on about mostly technical matters and finally came to a conclusion. However, he said they expect to ship a few units in December and start advertising and a greater product push in January after the Y2K stuff is off people's minds and when customer buying cycles reignite in January. He wants to get his market share from 12,500 units per quarter of M1 to about 24,000 units per quarter with the introduction of M2. Exabyte has about 10% of the midrange market according to their CEO and they want that increased to 20%. They are focused on getting the company back to profitability and a stronger balance sheet. In tone, the CEO sounds like a straight-shooter and a nice guy, but not much of a threat to DSS or their market share. I'd like to see him execute his plan, but it seems that it won't be easy. Oh, and there was a question about the company Ecrix (Z has mentioned this company a few times). He said that he hasn't heard much about their products even though they are said to be in distribution. He said that means nothing until the products get sold through by distys. More recently, in the Seagate CC last night, they were asked about LTO and didn't seem to be too excited about competing with the huge DLT installed base. This market is truly Quantum's to lose. Even the bad news from Storage Tech today sheds some light on the health and growth aspect of tape drives. They said that mainframe and disk sales were not growing as much, but tape drives and libraries were strong. Just some more anecdotal evidence. We'll see what Quantum says tomorrow night.

To: Sam who wrote (92)	10/13/1999 9:46:00 PM
From: Z Analyzer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 488

<<though there was a recall of the 8000 back in November, according to CDW computer records, as one of them maintained. But there are some in inventory at several places (though not at CDW; they are, however, at PC and MacWarehouse).>> Sam, Congrats on the legwork. Did you mean November for the recall (I thought the 8000 was much newer than that). Is there any way to reconcile your finding the 8000's in stock with Exabyte's comment about not being able to find any and some other comments others have made about them being on stop shipment? Since EXBT produces libraries that certainly utilize DLT 7000 and, I would have to assume the 8000, it seems like they should know. Somewhere, perhaps on Yahoo I read something about QNTM having had to disable the variable speed mechanism in the 8000 (which was added to help the DLT's backhitching). My guess is that we won't get a clear answer from QNTM tomorrow so our best info is likely to come from research like yours or any resellers that might visit our board. -Z