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

To: Carey Thompson who wrote (9784)	8/30/1998 2:27:00 AM
From: Frodo Baxter	Respond to of 11057

Three quarters ago, WDC had a book value of $700M and no debt. Currently, WDC has a book value of $320M and $520M in long-term debt. (Debt/Equity of 1.6) Using consensus estimates of $210M loss over the next three quarters, WDC will have a book value of $110M and approximately $535M in long-term debt. (Debt/Equity of 4.9) If this is a good stock, what's a bad one?

To: Carey Thompson who wrote (9784)	8/30/1998 10:38:00 AM
From: Sawtooth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11057

Carey: How refreshing to start seeing some useful information surface again from various folks on the thread. I've been reading some articles about the huge demand for storage coming up from ERP systems, DVD, data warehouse/data mining, as well as all the increasing amount of "stuff" people download off the net. The increase in demand for storage is discussed parallel with the increased demand for bandwidth. One technology that keeps popping up in these articles is holographic-based storage. The main company mentioned is IBM. Are you aware of what WDC is doing in this area or in other advanced storage technology areas? Thanks. (Not looking for you to do all the research on this but I don't know the answer at the moment and thought you might.) ...Tim

To: Carey Thompson who wrote (9784)	8/30/1998 9:43:00 PM
From: Greg Jung	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11057

Carey DVD is here and it won't be good for disk drives. DVD is standard feature on a Consumer Computer. DVD is here. Disk drives are in the tank. ergo my conclusion proven. I don't know all the in's and outs, but digital duplication will not be legal nor technically easy. Something about royalties. Why we don't have digital audio tape available. Greg

To: Carey Thompson who wrote (9784)	8/31/1998 8:13:00 PM
From: AC Flyer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 11057

DVD and WDC.... Carey, you posted: >>"There is a big application on the horizon (maybe 1999) that will require massive disk drives on your home computer. That is digital video device. DVD stores 3 hr. feature films on floppy disks the size of CDs.......Although DVD films are compressed, they still take over 3.5 gigabytes of storage. When one of these DVD films are copied, the user needs 3.5 GB just for that one operation."<< I would be the last person to forecast the end of technological progress, but I must nevertheless point out a couple of problems with your DVD scenario. To quote a very good, and very smart, Silicon Valley friend of mine....."DVD movies consume a lot of storage, but if Hollywood has anything to do with it, we're not all going to be storing their crown jewels on our hard disk drives.....How many people do you know who store CDs on their hard disks because it's cheaper, easier, etc? I suspect zero. People buy CDs for several reasons: they like to collect stuff, they are convenient, they are transportable and they're cheap.....DVD movies are going to be priced at around $20. Why would you use up a $200 30 gig drive to store 8 DVD movies. You wouldn't. Music and movies on a hard disk make no sense." On balance, it still seems to me that the mass market for hard drives is moving towards the $50 6Gig drive rather than the $200 30Gig drive. (Though I suspect that we will be able to buy both within 2 years).