To: Reseller who wrote (7457 ) 2/18/1999 10:56:00 AM From: Philip J. Davis Read Replies (1) | Respond to
Some other interesting tidbits from Maximum PC's interview of Ted Briscoe:Maximum PC: Do you wish you'd made the Zip drive backward compatible? No. We made a very deliberate decision not to go with backward-compatible products for three reasons. One is cost. When you have a drive that's backward compatible, you need multiple headsets. Right out of the gate you've got a cost issue that's going to burden your design, even when you gt to the point where people don't need, want, or even use the backward compatibility. The second was a growth path - the capacity was clearly limited. The third area is performance. We didn't want to encumber the design or the performance of the drive. Adding backward compatibility wouldn't have extended the drive's life, and we didn't want to burden our design or cost strategies.Maximum PC: But Sony's doing it with HiFD. Is that a good strategy? We don't think that's the right approach. Right now, Sony has an external HiFD drive with floppy compatibility. Every PC I know of has a floppy drive already in it. Why would you buy an external device with floppy compatibility instead of using the one built into your PC?Maximum PC: Why did it take so long for your new Clik! media to come out? Fair question. At the fall Comdex in 1996, we launched a technology initiative called "In Hand" - a miniaturized, PC card-based, 20MB Zip drive. The strategy was to throw the idea out, share the vision, see what kind of reaction we'd get from the market, then move on. The response was phenomenal! But as we visited customers, the universal response was, "We love the idea. But the capacity isn't enough, and it weighs too much, and the shock vibration specs aren't going to cut it. Oh, and by the way, you're using too much power." In other words, they told us our baby was ugly. So we executed an entire redesign of the product. The initial concept was going to be a Zip-compatible product; it was going to have a linear actuator like the Zip drives. But by moving to a rotary actuator, we could address the space and power issues raised. The actuator on the Clik drive today is very similar to what you'd see on a hard drive. This was a very painful decision for us, but it was the right thing to do. At the same time, we looked for ways to increase capacity. By relaying some of the electronics, we were able to increase the space for a disk without increasing the dimensions of the drive. That got us up to 40MB. We were also able to reengineer some of the electronics to get our power requirements down to an acceptable level. We also did a lot of work in the mechanical design to improve the shock and vibration specs.
