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Technology Stocks : Western Digital (WDC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul M. Rengier who wrote (7111)	11/2/1997 8:34:00 AM
From: TCGNJ	Respond to of 11057

Paul, What might the alternative technologies to hard disk drives be, and how competitive are they? When will they come to market? Thanks. TCG

To: Paul M. Rengier who wrote (7111)	11/2/1997 11:47:00 AM
From: Kevin Yang	Respond to of 11057

Paul, The thing I see as a possible threat to WDC is TeraStor. I don't know much about it, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. But, I've read some articles about them having some new technology that stores a lot more than conventional hard disks and also has equivalent or better access time. It's being developed by TeraStor and we'll see it next year. I have no idea who TeraStor is and if they will sell drives themselves, or instead sell the technology to HD manufacturers. You are correct, "The future of disk drives as a technology for storage is unclear". But, on the positive side, I believe we can react faster than Wall Street. As a consumer and computer user, we will know way before declining earnings happen, whether something is really going to take the market by storm and replace the conventional hard disk. Look at the zip drive. They were selling tons of those things months before the stock started its incredible move. And it was very obvious, to anyone who walked into a retail computer store, or tried to call Iomega's tech line. In fact I remember calling them and hearing a recording, "Due to the enormous success of our Zip Drive...." At that time the stock had not moved at all. Look at Intel. They are in a market with actual competition now! Once, a monopoly, the CPU market has Cyrix, and AMD, to drive INTC's profit margin down. It seems obvious that their 3rd quarter earnings would be affected substantially by this. Yet nothing was reflected in the stock price until the DAY after earnings release. My point is this, I'm not worried about other technolgies taking over. We will see it clearly and way before it happens. Kevin

To: Paul M. Rengier who wrote (7111)	11/2/1997 7:46:00 PM
From: Jimmy Chan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11057

the change of massive data storage won't change much for the next few years. current possible replacement would be optical magnito technology. i think we all heard of DVD, right? now, the plastic nature of DVD(the substrates are organic crystal) makes it not very suitable for high-performance and high tolerence industrial use. but home office and home uses are more likely to be first tested. who knows, but DVD has been pushed out for the past year, and not much action has been seen yet.