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Non-Tech : Any info about Iomega (IOM)? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Naggrachi who wrote (42479)	1/5/1998 8:35:00 PM
From: Lurker	Respond to of 58324

From the Motley Fool Board: Note the part that says that no one, but Iomega, can buy the machines that makes zip disks. This would certainly limit competition. << Making a Zip disk is much more than putting the platter inside the plastic case. Special machines (I think sole sourced from Thames, the company originally sued and settled with in the Nomai case) with proprietary tech from Iomega are needed to assemble the disks in any kind of volume. Disks are then placed in other machines that servo-write them. A Thames machine can only make so many disks. The servo-writing takes a few hours I think. You therefore need a lot of these servo-writing machines to make disks in volume. To make a lot of disks you need a lot of the Thames machines and a boatload of the servo-writers. This is why I worry little about Nomai: They obviously got their hands on some Thames machines, maybe some servo writers. They then only had to reverse engineer the reflector and get some media. I've assumed that the Thames/Iomega settlement means that nobody else can get the Thames machines. So if Nomai has 2-3 now they can only make a few hundred thousand disks at the most in a year. It would also mean that no other company could make Zip disks.>>