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Technology Stocks : Disk Drive Sector Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Simpson who wrote (8558)	8/18/2000 6:12:49 AM
From: Gus	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9256

Are these the same folks that couldn't keep EMC happy with enterprise drives The problem was with the 10k rpm drive program. SEG, which supplies close to 90% of EMC's drives, mastered this program a few years ago and is in the process of slowly rolling out its 15k rpm drives while Big Blue is still having problems with the 10k rpm drives. Big Blue also only fully embraced fibre channel last year (despite the 1996 SSA-FC detente with SEG) while Seagate has been pricing its SCSI and FC drives at practical parity for several years now. Are these the same folk that were going to flood the market with MR heads, were going to grow big business in component supply? Is this the same player that was going to finally give SEG a run for their money? C'mon Tom. LOL. No wonder you were the first person I thought of when a higher-up at IBM publicly complained a few months ago about "simply being sick and tired of ex-IBMmers kicking sand in its face." Try to imagine Big Blue, with its not-invented-here history, trying to do an impression of a skinny Charles Atlas at the beach determined to bulk up and cop a really odd more-open-than-thou attitude. LOL. Without a doubt, the sheer disk drive manufacturing capacity that IBM brought to the industry over the last six years has contributed mightily to its current state of structural unprofitability. What at one time in 1996 was a business dominated by the big 3 -- SEG, QNTM and WDC with 80% of the desktop. IBM, however, continues to dominate the laptop drive business with their density advances and it looks like their microdrives (now priced below $500) will get some major plays in the wireless data space. Until the EMC fiasco, their enterprise drive program was fueling its furious attempt to surpass Hitachi for second place behind EMC in the mainframe+open system subset of the heteregeneous system market. As you know, their desktop drive program was always a cherry-picking program and their head operations clearly proved to be disruptive to everybody including itself. The question is whether that projection is a self-fulfilling forecast given some stealth additions to manufacturing capacity to finally nail the coffins of some of these vampire-like component suppliers and realign the industry....once and for all. Again! lol What is different this time is that the IBM Mass Storage division now has its own budget and no longer reports to the Enterprise Computing division. Also, IBM and Compaq recently entered into a blood compact of sorts in the corporate storage market. Already, Compaq has launched a major foray in the network-attached storage space alongside its disk drive suppliers and using Microsoft's embedded NT OS, which has disk-based and disk-less option. It smells like murder by numbers (units) to me.