Storage Effect

Who makes your drives?  Do you care? 

Working at Seagate, I’m very aware of our market share and that of our competitors.  We slice it every which way, and understand exactly how we stack up. 

It sometimes catches me by surprise when I see data such as this report from CRN and The NPD Group that lists HP as the #2 disk drive vendor, right behind Seagate in the US channel in the 1st half of 2007.  With my Seagate hat on, I think, “HP doesn’t make disk drives!  Why would NPD report it that way?”

The reality is, our customers in the channel don’t always care who made the drive, but do care who sold it to them.  That’s because they will hold their source accountable for any issues or support needed after purchase. 

I struggle with this, because I believe we build a better disk drive than our competitors in most cases.  That may be true, but it’s good for me to see things from your eyes, and realize it’s not all about us!

What do you think about when making a disk drive decision?  Do you care if a particular vendor manufactured your drive?

64% of system builders to transition their customers to Windows Vista in the next year

I was in Palo Alto, CA Tuesday for our quarterly live NetSeminar.  This quarter’s topic: using storage to add value to your Windows Vista solutions. 

Bret Rohloff from Microsoft joined Amy Fyfe, Seagate’s channel alliance guru, and I on the live broadcast.  We had 171 live attendees, with lots of questions - a high energy event.  You can view this archived webinar on Seagate’s partner portal once it’s uploaded, although you do have to become a Seagate Partner.  It’s easy and free if you qualify as a system builder.

Conventional wisdom is that Windows Vista is struggling to take off.  Based on the Seagate Partners on the webinar, it will ramp rapidly in the channel over the next 12 months: 

Vista adoption may be having a slow start, but all Windows OS launches do.  It’s the nature of the beast. We’re talking about swapping out the engine, not replacing a light bulb. It’s not that it’s technically difficult, it’s that it’s at the center of all we do with our PCs.

Also counter to prevailing opinion, the transition is not limited to consumers, based on the business-dominant market focus of the system builders sampled here:

Take heart, Bill Gates!  The channel is coming through for you!

36% of consumers have “priceless” data, but few back it up

Check out the results of a Harris Interactive to poll commissioned by Seagate:
U.S. consumers were asked, “If you had to put a price tag on your digital content (photos, documents, movies, music, etc.), stored on your computer(s), how much would that be?”

- 10% said their data was worth nothing (I don’t understand these people)
- 30% said it was worth $1 to $1,000
- 19% said it was worth $1,000 to $5,000
- 5% said it was worth over $5,000
- 36% said it was priceless

If an average PC costs about a thousand dollars, more than half of us think what’s on our hard drive is worth more than the PC it resides on.

I shouldn’t be too surprised, given the sheer quantity of stuff that people are saving.  How many iTunes songs do they own at $1 a pop?  How about last season’s TV shows, or the DVDs they ripped?  But it’s the personal content that takes the value of their digital stuff beyond $1,000.

More surprising: over a third consider this information priceless. As in irreplaceable.  I wonder how many of these folks back up their data?  From what I’ve heard, more don’t than do.

Sounds like a potential Visa commercial: “Downloading the new Bruce Springsteen album: $9.99. Downloading Season 3 of The Office: $34.99.  Converting my parents’ wedding movies to digital: $100.  Recovering it all after my PC crashes: priceless.”

Isn’t this is a huge opportunity for solution providers?  Whether building the system or selling through someone else’s box, seems like one could build a good business helping consumers get the most out of the information, rather than the PC.  And/or helping them keep it safe. How are you doing this?

What is your own data’s worth?  What’s priceless to you?  Do you backup your personal data?