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

To: Gary Burton who wrote (3641)	6/12/1998 2:14:00 AM
From: Mark Oliver	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 9256

Yes, it paints a pretty dismal picture, but then how much do you believe in their ability to forcast? It's probably better than mine. Still, what can we say from this report if it is true? Observations. - 5.25 drives holding their market share with slight gains of 9.7% in 98 and 8.5% in 99 only to begin falling in 2000. How many companies have a 5.25 program? Does this indicate Quantum's Bigfoot will continue to have a place? Looking at capacity points, they have a pretty obvious pattern. I wonder what this means in terms of heads and media? Does it look to you all like the number of platters is not falling as fast as on could assume. For me this issue of heads and media is as important as drive units. - Capacity doesn't imply that sub $500 PC's will have small drives. We talk about these machines not needing more than 2 or 3 gig drives at most, but here they keep showing higher and higher capacity points taking the bulk of sales. Why don't they show a 2 gig drive, selling for say $15, going into a mass market Internet PC? I wonder which of these capacities they expect to see in Autos? - 2.5 inch drives show some good growth and these are probably going to be higher profit for products. This market seem to have been left to IBM and the Japanese. But how long can they agree to leave margins high? - IBM is surely the star of the show. If they start supplying the guts to NEC, WDC, Maxtor and others, it really becomes a route. How long can this continue? - Predictions for 1 inch drives seem to have no rhyme or reason. Does this look like a guess? Do they believe in IBM's program to make small drives with 400 megs for consumer products like cameras? In the end, it's interesting to see what is probably a pretty darn good educated guess, but really it's based on issues that can not be calculated. Just look at how poorly everyone is prepared for what we have happening today. It would be interesting to know what technological shifts they base their guesses on, such as new consumer products, bandwidth, PC prices, etc. I also wonder how they figure the y2k issues into their plan? Anyway, lots of interesting food for thought for our resident experts to chew. Regards, Mark PS Do you think this report has been concocted to make the Maxtor IPO look better? :o)