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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Prophet who wrote (9008)	1/31/2000 10:12:00 AM
From: Ausdauer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 60323

Prophet and Thread, January 27, 2000 was a very special day. My son turned 4 years old that day and we already had a small party planned for that evening. In addition, SanDisk posted its largest single day gain to date. Needless to say, there was some celebrating at our house. Over the weekend we had a party for him. Both pre-school classmates and neighborhood playmates came to celebrate. I took 183 photos on a single 64 MB SanDisk CompactFlash card and posted the best shots on our family Internet photo album with invitations for all the families to come and visit the site. I am just guessing there will be 5 or 6 families anxious to buy a digital camera when they see the site. Some talk of catching the "shutter bug", well, digital photography is habit forming, highly contagious and incurable. Ausdauer *SanDisk...See the Big Picture!!!*

To: The Prophet who wrote (9008)	1/31/2000 11:32:00 AM
From: Derek C.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

This is a good question. I don't know when they can reach your price target. I believe SD will be cheaper for to manufacture. As far as consumers are concerned SD and CF will be relatively the same price. I don't think there is a need for that high of a capacity to fuel the market. I think you can hold one hour of music into 32-64MB card ( depending on the compression technique). People will be concerned about the price of Flash since they are used to CD or tape in the beginning. But I guess it is similar to CF and chemical Film. CF is a lot more expensive than film but it is sold out at stores. People are starting to realize that it is not the same thing. Sony is a competitor for Sandisk but it is one of their best marketing arms. Sony's Memory Stick uses Flash technology and has the similar price structures. Sony is educating the market about the benefits of Flash. Sony invented MD(inexpensive media) and is very successful in Japan. They are very aggressively pushing Flash based Memory Stick players. Cheers, Derek

To: The Prophet who wrote (9008)	2/1/2000 8:09:00 PM
From: Craig Freeman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

Prophet, re: "if I could buy a card for $10 which could hold 10 hours of music ..." You can buy such a "card" today for far less. It's called a CD. CD-Recordable drives have reached the point where they can cut an entire CD in under 10 minutes on "8X" media. Super-high-quality Ricoh CDs cost about $1.25 and have a 90%+ success rate during the recording process (my own experience is that the rate approaches 100%). Personally, I think that Flash won't have a competitive edge for "big jobs" until it gets down to 0.18u or below. At that point it will still cost more for flash but the advantages of size, durability and convenience will outweigh the extra cost. Until then, it's hard to argue with using CDs for PC back-up as well as recording music. Anyone interested is advised to check out the HP and Plextor product lines. Their IDE drives replace you existing CD-reader for a bit more than $200. For recordable CDs at the right price, check out cdrexpress.com For stock in a really terrific semi company in whom I am long, contact sandisk.com :-) Craig PS On my personal PC, I have both a 20GB tape backup and an HP CD-RW drive. With all the files I keep handy, it takes ~3 hours to back up the entire drive to tape (even at 100MB per minute!) The "clickety, clitety, whoosh" tape noise is too much for light sleepers so I rarely get a "round tuit". But so little of this data changes that I can make CD-RW backups of all changes in ~30 minutes using $4 CD-RW media. Every so often, I pop in 8X CDR media and make a backup that ANYONE can read in most any PC. It's a comforting feeling to know that my hard drive can make a sound like "BLAM! ... tick, tick, tick" and I still won't be out in the cold.

To: The Prophet who wrote (9008)	2/2/2000 7:20:00 AM
From: Ausdauer	Respond to of 60323

Prophet, The only question is will the price of SD be cheap enough, at some point, for consumers to want to buy "secure" flash memory. For example, if I could buy a card fpor $10 which could hold 10 hours of music, I would be willing to do so and then just buy "downloadable" MP3-like music for $3-5 a record. That would deter me from cheating and trying to go pure MP3 knockoff. I had a neighbor inquire about the CompactFlash card in my camera this weekend at my son's birthday party. He asked about its cost. I told him I get almost 200 high resolution images on a 64MB card that I paid $140 for. He said that seemed kind of expensive. Then I told him the card never wears out. Then he said, "How are they ever going to make any money on these things?" I think the cost for CompactFlash is easily justifiable to the consumers who are buying mid-level and upper-end digital cameras. I have made this argument many times. The problem is that this cost basis does not sit as well with consumers buying handheld computers and mp3 players. I think it may be possible to set different target prices for CF and MMC/SD to reflect consumer preferences. As Eli said, the cost of removable storage needs to be some fraction of the cost of a host device. Thus, if mp3 players ring up at $99.99 or less, then a moderate capacity SD Memory card or MMC will need to be well under this level. According to the VCALL that is available at RadioWallStreet a target price of under $20.00 for a very high capacity MMC or SDMC is an attainable target. As I posted earlier, Infineon representatives state that flash ROM is as cheap as "dirt" indicating that read-only pre-recorded content on flash is just around the corner. Ausdauer