Seagate 10% RIF

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 ΔV 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 ΔV.