As seen on Barrons. CEO Watkins is out, replaced with Stephen Luczo. Seagate makes good disk drives, and drive prices have been hammered in recent weeks. Pricing went into something near a free-fall over the last 6 weeks. While this is good for JackRabbit and ÎV customers, it is bad for drive manufacturers that have to show a sustained profit. Seagate is reporting that it had a bad December, and as many other technological based product outfits have as well, I think this may be the first of many such announcements.
Seagate is also on the wrong end of the SSD debate. Now some folks think SSDs are the next greatest-thing-since-sliced-bread, and others are advising caution. We see them as useful for specific functions. While reducing the amount of motors and moving parts in a machine is a good thing, unfortunately, there is nothing with the capacity/reliability of spinning rust … yet. There will likely be, and it may be flash or similar. I don’t know. What I do know is that customers are demanding faster, more reliable, all at a lower cost. We are aggressively going after this, driving costs down while increasing performance on JackRabbit and ÎV.