Mel,
After all the Zip disk is the catchers mitt for the Internet!! Hope that this has some potential for selling lots more removable storage products.
I agree, one would have to store the stuff somewhere!
On another note, here is a very interesting post from the AOL Motley Fool Iomega stock board. It is a collection of posts over time from someone who says he works for Iomega. Here it is:
The following are some very interesting posts by a person (W7) who claims to work for Iomega. They were posted on the Internet Motley Fool IOM message board.
******************************************
Subject: Re: Apple Strategic Partners
With Castlewood ORB
Date: 1/15/99 8:37 PM
Author: w7
Number: of 17401
>>That article stated that IOM's Zip technology is old and that
MR technology (that which is used in ORB) is much "cheaper"
and I suppose more advanced. Could anyone comment on this in
layman's terms??<<
Zip uses an "inductive" head. Basically, this works a lot like a
transformer. Most conventional hard drives now use a
"magnetoresistive" or MR head, which is based on a tiny film of
metal that changes resistance in the presence of a magnetic field.
For a given size, an MR head has more output than an inductive
head. So you can make a smaller head, and still get an acceptable
signal/noise ratio if you use MR.
However, the MR head is vastly more sensitive to damage from
electrostatic discharge than the inductive head is. Most people
have a few hundred volts on them, when they're just sitting
around. Walk across a carpet on a dry day, and you could easily
be sitting at 30,000 volts. 25 volts will blow an MR head away.
Iomega is starting to use MR heads, but the hold-up was getting
satisfactory reliability. Every time you remove or insert a
cartridge, you risk blowing the read/write head. That's a problem
you don't have with conventional hard drives. Until those
problems were under control, moving to an MR head would have
been a unwise engineering choice.
**************************************************
Subject: Re: Apple Strategic Partners
With Castlewood ORB
Date: 1/16/99 1:29 AM
Author: w7
Number: of 17401
>>I'm curious as to whether and how Castlewood solved the
"sensitivity to damage from electrostatic discharge" in the Orb<<
Good question! I'm not sure that they have solved the problem. If
they have, it is a good bit of engineering. If they have not, they
are going to have an awful field failure rate.
MR heads have been around for several years, and have been
commercially practical for about the past three years or so.
BTW, the bad disk platters that caused that big Jaz recall a year
or so ago were bought by other manufacturers. Speculation is that
Syquest bought a bunch, and built them into cartridges which
Iomega now owns and probably wishes it didn't. I do know that
Iomega got tons of very expensive capital equipment, very very
cheap.
************************************************
Subject: Re: Consensus FY99 up to
$0.33
Date: 1/17/99 9:13 PM
Author: w7
Number: of 17402
>>Shortsellers, meanwhile, are willing the good ship IOM to start
sinking. I notice that they consistently predict that future products
will overtake IOM. Tragic failure of vision IMHO; why on earth
won't IOM continue to develop new products at the same pace, or
better, than the competition? <<
Exactly so! They keep comparing other company's FUTURE
products against Iomega's PRESENT products. Iomega is large
enough to have a solid R&D crew, and there is practically no
technology that is available to others that is not also available to
Iomega.
**************************************************
Subject: Re: Sony HiFD: Certainly
Perfect/Recalled?
Date: 1/19/99 12:17 AM
Author: w7
Number: of 17402
>>Angle of the head? Scrapping on the disc? Is there a maven of
magnetic magnitude to clarify this?<<
No magnetic maven here, put some possibly helpful information-
The head is indeed mounted so that it can "float" on a thin air
bearing. However, it is not free to move in all the possible
dimensions. Using an airplane analogy, the "nose" can come up
or go down, the "wings" can go up and down, but the head is not
supposed to turn left to right, as in operating the "rudder".
If discs have been scraped, it sounds like something extreme and
out of the ordinary has happened.
***********************************
Subject: Re: EPS
Date: 1/21/99 12:17 AM
Author: w7
Number: of 17402
Mike Crawford wrote:
**** My quess is $.11 EPS ****
Interesting projection. I'll find out earnings right along with
everyone else, but the savings numbers I hear about from the Six
Sigma program are staggering. We aren't far enough into it to see
the full results yet. 1999 will be the first year that some of the
major savings will be in place. I will be very interested in seeing
of costs are indeed down, and if some of that is attributed to Six
Sigma.
************************************
Subject: Ops meeting
Date: 2/5/99 11:32 PM
Author: w7
Number: of 17402
A couple of comments from today's meeting of all operations
people at Iomega-
Inventory half what it was at peak, now 10 turns.
Defective product in the .1% range.
Margin up sharply to 28%.
Unit sales up 35%, revenue level.
Lots of Zip USB and 250 shipped, customer problems even lower
than established product.
Retail warranty rate down by half vs. last year.
Six Sigma program producing serious results.
The marching orders: cut defects in half, every year from now on.
I have to say it was a heartwarming meeting.
**********************************
Subject: Re: SSB: Andrew Barrett's
remarks
Date: 2/6/99 10:42 AM
Author: w7
Number: of 17403
>>Could the management change be Jodie's emphasis on delivering a flaw free product at a profit?<<
Possibly, but the company is also going through de-divisionalization. The move is back to a simple, functional organization--one R&D group, working on all products, one marketing and sales group, one manufacturing organization.
***************************************
Subject: Re: Ops meeting
Date: 2/6/99 8:53 PM
Author: w7
Number: 17364
>>Do you work there?<<
Yes.
*************************************
Subject: Re: Acquisitions?
Date: 2/7/99 9:14 PM
Author: w7
Number: 17396
>>but the presence of such a high-powered individual in this line of expertise can only suggest acquisitions in IOM's future.<<
Further supported by the fact that Jody Glore made extensive use of acquisitions to build Rockwell.
******************************************
Subject: Re: Ops meeting
Date: 2/7/99 10:07 PM
Author: w7
Number: of 17403
>>could you please explain what you mean by:
"Inventory half what it was at peak, now 10 turns."
and:
"Six Sigma program producing serious results."<<
At one time in 1998, inventory was up around $350 million. It is
now down around $165 million, which frees up about $185 million in cash. Of course, the smaller inventory is as a percent of sales, the better you are managing. At $165 million, we sell our total inventory 10 times a year, or "10 turns". The target for next year is better yet, by quite a bit.
Six Sigma is a major program for reducing costs, reducing defects, and increasing customer satisfaction. It is basically a very rigorous, statistics based system for finding and fixing problems. We've only been using since about June of 1998, so we are just seeing the beginning of the results, but I hear that results are already above $10 million per year, and climbing. $10 million here, $10 million there, and pretty quick it adds up to real money.
_____________________________________________________________________
IMO, very interesting stuff.
Dave
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