BluRay looks to win the battle, while electronic distribution wins the war
Nortel’s CTO John Roese dreams about the possibilities of a 4G world on GigaOm, and it makes Seagate’s CEO Bill Watkins’ comments on the Format Wars ring very true. Bill points out that the battle between BluRay and HD DVD has been incredibly overhyped, since the world is moving beyond DVDs as the entertainment medium of choice.
Electronic distribution has quietly won the war, and the spoils go to spinning media.
Consumers are downloading their movies onto their home computers at a torrential rate. Home entertainment solutions that provide terabytes of capacity are the future.
Actually, they’re here now, as anyone who walked the aisles at CES this year would know.
PCs, Home Servers and Entertainment Systems (Apple TV?) are the combatants in the next battle that matters for consumer content. Where will all of those terabytes of movies in the home reside?
In Singapore, IT malls take competition to another level
Singapore is a lush, clean and beautiful city, with more shopping malls per capita than I’ve seen anywhere. It’s no surprise that when it comes to computers, consumer electronics and even business systems, Singaporeans head to the mall.
Like most places, there are electronics superstores here. But IT malls are the most acitve market for technology for consumers and small businesses.
Funan DigitalLife Mall is a high-end version; in the past I’ve visited its down-and-dirty sibling, SimLim Square. Imagine a Best Buy store with 20 competitors, all offering basically the same products, all inside a single enclosed mall.
It’s no wonder that prices are so competitive here. Imagine how difficult it is for these businesses to differentiate themselves. Last trip I was able to buy a mobile storage chassis, ready to plug in a 2.5″ disk drive for a working solution, for about US$3.50.
At Funan, brand name computers and consumer electronics dominate. Consumers and businesses go to SimLim more to buy components or to have a shop custom build a system for them while they wait.
I’m on my way to Asia for business, and hope to share a few storage market tidbits along the way.
There’s no doubt globalization has genericized much of the way we live. In any large shopping mall, on first blush it’s hard to tell what city, country or continent one is shopping in.
In contrast, the ‘final mile’ of technology solutions - how businesses and even consumers actually get their hands on their computers and storage - varies dramatically by geography. I’ll report back this month on some of the differences I see in Singapore, Shanghai and Tokyo.
Solid state drives are a winning solution - but when and where?
Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate, talked to X-bit labs about flash and SSDs. Flash is exciting technology - just don’t expect it to replace tried and true disk drives in a big way any time soon.
Despite all the noise about flash in notebook PCs, Bill sees the first true sweet spot for flash being in enterprise applications. For notebooks, much of the power, performance and reliability benefits of pure flash are either overstated or can be gained today for a much lower cost with hybrid drives.
Hybrid drives combine flash with a disk drive and use the flash as a uber-cache, giving you the benefits of both technologies in one solution.
I’ve posted many time on this topic - here and here and here.
What say you? Will you be plunking down the big bucks for a solid state notebook this year?
Yet another example of paradigm-changing ideas that demand more storage
Robert Scoble is in Davos, Switzerland practicing his novel brand of journalism. He live streams interviews from his cell phone, while responding to live questions from viewers.
This caught the BBC’s eye, as I’m sure it has many journalists and media companies. It’s a totally new take on broadcast journalism that portends dramatic change in that industry.
What does it mean for storage? Yet another content multiplier driving tons of storage capacity. Rather than creating one version of news reporting/analysis, interactive interviews like these will create hundreds or thousands of versions of a story or topic. All video, all needed to be archived and distributed.
Removable disk drives create unique value and profitable business
Jon Johnson of CRU-Dataport described some of the new, high-growth applications for removable storage. We’re not talking about thumb drives. He sees removable storage re-inventing surveillance, education, and professional services applications in less-than-obvious ways.
Sound familiar? Nortech and Cor Digital both called out these markets as fertile ground for their businesses.
Consider enhancing your solution with technology that makes things easier and more productive for your customer - and sets you apart from your competitors.
Tell your real-world tech stories and be part of an IT comic series
Here’s a fun diversion from Microsoft and Seagate: a collaborative IT hero/comic/adventure! Feels like ”Dilbert Meets the Justice League”, with storylines contributed by…you?
The idea of IT folks as unsung heroes rings true to me. Saving people’s bacon day after day from problems and threats that they don’t even know (or necessarily care) about sounds as much like the technology team at my job as it does Superman.
Invisible and indispensable - about time for a little celebrating of these roles! Tell your stories and get it in on the fun.
Byte and Switch talks about the storage impact of social networking on pure play Web 2.0 social networking sites as well as businesses in general.
The infrastructure seems to be emulating the network it supports, demanding what they call “cloud computing”. The needs are less about performance or even capacity, but managing the content cloud as it grows and changes.
EMC and IBM are on it. So are a slew of newer storage technology companies.
One thing’s for sure about storage for social networking: there’s going to be a lot of it.
Flash has the capacity but not yet the price for mainstream adoption
LaCie’s Little Disk teaches a good lesson to prognosticators of flash memory-based storage devices: it takes more than capacity to make a storage product sell.
Flash and SSD have been media darlings lately, with wild-eyed predictions of the demise of disk drives by many in the industry. The reality is that technology transitions like this take decades, not years, to play out.
A dual technology strategy (disk and SSD) makes great business sense. Obviously Samsung is actively pursuing both flash and spinning media today. Seagate is on the same path.
Flash is still not much more than a twinkle in the eye of the storage industry. It’s exciting, not yet ready for wide-scale adoption. This great comment from Engadget’s post sums it up nicely.
It’s not the specs that drive storage device adoption; it’s having the right price for those specs.
TechCrunch condensed Steve Jobs’ 90-minute keynote from MacWorld into 60 seconds. How’s that for time management? Thanks Nick.
On the storage front, the most interesting announcement from Apple was Time Capsule. It adds up to 1 terabyte of storage to an Airport Extreme. Apple joins the fight for the Home’s centralized content storage!
Will the PC win? Or Home Servers? Or backup storage external storage?
