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

To: Cogito who wrote (57936)	11/8/1998 11:48:00 AM
From: Cogito	Respond to of 58324

Herb, all - I really must do something today besides obsessing about Iomega. Here's a copy of an e-mail message I just sent to TechWeb about Jan Stafford's article. >>Jan Stafford's article entitled "Mobile Ledger -- Meltdown!" in issue 1423, November 9, 1998 is confusing and mistake-ridden. It presents a very inaccurate picture of the removable storage market. All of the confusion stems from the fact that the author apparently doesn't realize that there are two distinct segments of the removable storage market. There is the high-capacity floppy segment, including the Iomega Zip drive and Imation's LS-120, or SuperDisk. These products have capacities of 100MB and 120MB, respectively. Then there's the removable cartridge hard disk segment, with Iomega's Jaz (1GB) and Jaz2 (2GB), and SyQuest's SyJet (1.5GB) and SparQ (1GB). There have also been a few products, from SyQuest and Avatar, which have tried to compete with Zip using a hard disk cartridge with capacites from 130MB to 250MB. The article quotes Disk/Trend President Jim Porter as saying "The market for these products is not as big as these companies thought it was." Then it goes on to say, "In fact, Porter says the market won't live up to Disk/Trends projection of 2.7 million units shipped in worldwide sales this year. 'They'll be lucky to hit 2 million,' he says." This doesn't specify that Mr. Porter is only talking about the hard disk cartridge (1GB and up) segment of the removables market. Just as a point of information, Iomega reported Zip drive unit sales of more than 6.1 million for the first three quarters of this year. In 1997 they sold roughly 6.9 million Zip drives. Later in the article, the author says "SyQuest was also losing the battle against its only real competitor, Iomega. Last year, Iomega shipped 818,000 drives worldwide, compared with SyQuest's 237,000 drives, according to Disk/Trend." The figure for Iomega sales is only for their Jaz product line. Then, in the next paragraph we see " 'SyQuest has been losing ground to Iomega's Zip drive for a while,' says Ray Freeman, analyst for Freeman Associates, a research firm in Santa Barbara, Calif. SyQuest introduced its SparQ drive last year, but the product didn't catch on." Once again, the author is confused. SparQ is a 1GB, hard disk cartridge drive. Zip is a 100MB floppy disk cartridge drive. SyQuest found that they couldn't compete with Zip, even when offering a faster, higher-capacity drive (the EZ Flyer 230) at nearly the same price point. They decided to go after the 1GB removable hard disk market with SparQ. Now SyQuest is out of business, and Iomega is projecting a return to profitability this quarter.<< - Allen