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Non-Tech : Iomega Thread without Iomega -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ken Pomaranski who wrote (9388)	4/23/1999 4:58:00 PM
From: Cameron Dorey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10072

"My point is that the market will eventually split into three: [1 & 2 snipped] (3) high end: forever analog!" Tell that to the people who are buying the $7000 Nikon E3 (and the successor which has been announced for Fall availability). Cameron "If you're always right, there's something wrong."

To: Ken Pomaranski who wrote (9388)	4/23/1999 5:30:00 PM
From: Pacing The Cage	Respond to of 10072

>>My point is that the market will eventually split into three:<< I believe they are proposing a fourth segment to the market, or an extension of your item 2 (middle). This would consist of people that would take their pictures with a Clik! equipped digital camera, then since they don't have the equipment / knowhow / time / computer! (choose one) to print the pictures themselves, they take the Clik! disk ("Film") up to the corner drugstore to have the pictures printed by professionals. This scenario has been discussed in the past and it makes a lot of sense for the following reasons: 1) Kodak / Fuji, etc. will not be willing to give up the film developing revenue to Digital cameras without a fight. They could embrace this format and continue to sell paper and 'processing equipment' under their own name. 2) It maintains the status quo. Ma and Pa Sixpack are comfortable with dropping the film off at the neighborhood drugstore, and getting prints of little Bubba back in an hour. They may not even own a computer, and if they do have one it is only used for playing Solitaire. 3) Not everyone that owns a computer will have a hard drive big enough to store all of their precious images on, or a printer that is capable of printing photo quality images. I believe that this is a large segment of the potential market myself. -Ken

To: Ken Pomaranski who wrote (9388)	4/23/1999 6:08:00 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10072

>>(2) middle end - digital cams. Camera users will transfer pictures directly from camera to the PC. The PCs (with megastorage) will be the ultimate repository of the pictures. The 'picture' directory will be backed up on ZIPs or CD R/W drives.<< Ken - Well, I finally reached a point in the project I'm working on where I have Internet access AND a moment to join in the discussion. I've been monitoring the scene here the last couple of weeks, and have wanted to respond to a couple of different points, but . . . Anyway, I think you miss the point completely with your middle of the digicam market concept. People can transfer their pictures directly to their PCs only if they are near their PCs when they take the pictures. For the foreseeable future, as the picture quality and file size of digital cameras goes up as fast as the price of flash ram comes down, most people will be able to store only a few pictures in the camera at any one time. If you take the kids to Disneyland, say, won't you want to take more than four to eight pictures during the day? I'd think you'd be pleased to be able to take your Agfa or other camera with a Clik! drive built in, so you could take twenty, thirty, or even more pictures. Then you'd go home and transfer the pictures directly to the PC from the Clik! disks via the camera. And don't tell me that parents won't spend five hundred bucks for a digital camera. If that were true, camcorders would never have taken off as a product. BTW, your comments about Zip demand were, in my opinion, wrong. Since more Zip drives are being sold, demand is obviously still there. Yes, this demand has been kept alive by pricing actions as much as anything else, but that doesn't mean it doesn't count. In the computer world, everything has to become cheaper over time. Zip is still profitable, even with increased OEM sales. Rocky's comments that OEM sales are "killing" Iomega is just loopy. Zip's strongest selling point continues to be the fact that there are millions of them out there. With each new million sold, that selling point becomes even stronger. Moreover, tie ratios remain solid. It's too bad margins on Jaz drives aren't as high as some have assumed. If they were, the company wouldn't have lost money on Jaz in Q1. But part of the problem was that disk sales were slow in Q1. That could be just a temporary situation. If Jaz disk sales pick up going forward, that 3 mil loss could be erased easily. Still, I won't argue the fact that Jaz continues to be a niche product, and Zip is carrying the company. But we'll see. - Allen