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

To: Bill Ulrich who wrote (49797)	3/12/1998 10:33:00 AM
From: Bob Sheard	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 58324

A few random thoughts... Have you been to the Dell web site lately? They are arguably the world's most successful PC maker, and they seem to be 100% behind Iomega. They now have Zips for as low as $79 on many PCs. It doesn't take a genius to know that lower costs will result in higher sales (and it's quite possible that Iomega still breaks even at this price). This quarter could be big for Dittomax. I know it is a small percentage of Iomega's sales, but it could still add some cash to the bottom line. Presumably the factories are fully ramped up now on this product, yet it is certainly not piling up on retail shelves anywhere. Margins on the cartridges are probably real good. Still no official product announcement on the Sony HiFD, right? Does anyone know whether that is the name that it will be sold under? If so it ranks right down their with LS-120. Obviously this product will cost much more to product than the Zip drive. There are three main reasons for this: Higher capacity/performance costs more to produce, backward compatibility means extra hardware and trickier engineering, and because it takes a while to reduce costs on a brand new product. Selling it at $149 would mean taking some hefty losses. I know this is Sony, but do they really want to take huge losses while competing with a $100 million advertising budget and a product that has an installed base of 15-20 million? All in a big gamble to make some money at some point in the future? Whatever. Any predictions on when we will get an announcement that 2 million Jaz drives have been sold? I'm thinking next quarter. Once the Zip drive is available as an option from all PC makers at the $79 price, its almost all over for LS-120 and Sony HiFD. They just can't compete at these levels. The final nail in the coffin will be a full ramp-up of the slim notebook drives by the end of the year. The only reason I am nervous about Q1, is low quantities of Jaz2 and Buz. On the other hand, Q2 should be big. Bob