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Technology Stocks : Seagate Technology -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stitch who wrote (5366)	8/3/1998 8:15:00 PM
From: Frodo Baxter	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7841

>If you are comparing direct head count then better to add in employees of the suppliers to the others as well. Then take into account that Seagate still has 22% of unit market share (according to IDC) and that is about equal to Maxtor and IBM combined. I doubt if on a true comparison Seagate has more employees then other drive makers if normalized by output. Softball. QNTM (6219) + WDC (13507) + MXTR (5578) + APM (8500) + RDRT (23107) + HMTT (2248) + KMAG (4689) + STMD (2400) = 66248, which is still much less than SEG's 87322. >As to the top line I presume you mean over the last several quarters...so...who has? Do you think they never will? Who has? IBM, Maxtor and Fujitsu. As for your second question. Well, never is a long time. But I do know this. SEG fell off the tech curve on desktop and their share is now a pittance. They fell off (not as badly) the tech curve on enterprise, and share has slumped from majority to plurality. I figure IBM, WDC, QNTM, and Fujitsu are worthy competitors in this space now. That means a natural share of 20% each. One last thing. The performance gap between SCSI and IDE has narrowed tremendously, almost to the point of being purely an "interface" gap. Thus, I view common platform development as a likely eventuality. You think SEG doesn't know this? Their Big Bear comes in both IDE and SCSI, offers comparable performance to a Cuda 9LP, and costs considerably less. Over time, this means the gross margin premium that SCSI demands will probably disappear. Which HD maker has historically gotten the most gravy from this premium? How's that for schadenfruede?