by Sindy Atoms
by Sindy Atoms While Quantum and Hewlett-Packard were spreading there share of blue news
to the industry last month, IBM seems to be spreading green, as in cold hard
cash. Big Blue is pumping $380 million into disk drive manufacturing plants in
an effort to catch up in the magneto-resistance head market. While the company
already makes the MR heads, it is now expected to sell these on the open market
next year. Earlier this year the company dropped $500 million, big money even
for them. New people, new places. Maxtor seems to be slowly changing its
management team. Last month Michael Cannon was named president and chief
executive, replacing C.S. Park, who takes the role of vice chairman. Now two
more top dogs in and one out. Paul Tufano, formerly of IBM's storage group, has
been appointed veep of finance while Phil Duncan has joined the company as veep
in human resources. But to off set the imports, Patrick Verderico, Maxtor's
chief operating officer, has left the building. The fighters are taking their
corners.
Compaq has expanded the number of systems it ships with the
LS-120 when it launched its Deskpro line. It now has six systems supporting the
storage format, up from two. All the while Iomega continues its slow drive to
gain more partners for its Zip drives. Seagate is the latest to align itself
when it announced that it will build Jaz drive cartridges. With Packard Bell,
NEC, Hewlett-Packard, Acer and even Bandai Digital Entertainment Corp.
supporting Iomega's Zip drive, a widening split is developing in the PC
industry. While I believe that standards are a good thing for the industry, I
am enjoying the emerging standards fight between the LS-120 and Zip camps. Its
been too long since this happened. While the industry gives a great deal of lip
service to letting market dynamics determined what is successful and what fails,
it rarely happens. And of course you remember Compaq's ACE consortium and its
move away from Intel? Oh, you don't? First you set standards, then you make
logos. The CompactFlash Association has a certification program to ensure
interoperability between all CompactFlash cards. That's good news for all of
the digital camera users who use flash for storage. The question is, everyone
has seen a digital camera, but know anybody that uses one? No I don't either.
But this market (small card not camera) is also facing its share of turmoil.
Besides the CF standard there is also the Solid State Floppy Disk Card, the
Miniature Card, and the Small PC Card, all headed down different paths.
One
who is being left out in the cold these days is SyQuest Technology, which
reported a very poor quarter with a net loss of $41 million, due in part to the
poor performance of its EZ 135 product line. Departing the company was founder
Syed Iftikar, from its board. However SyQuest did unveil its SyJet removable
storage solution, which in a 3.5-inch from factor can store 1.3G-bytes of data.
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