Quantum contemplates rebound
Published: 11 Dec 2003 10:45 GMT
It's funny that you guys started out in hard drives, you got out of hard drives and into tape. And now the hard drive companies that have survived are all doing great, and you guys are having trouble. Do you think it was the right decision to go into tape in the long run?
The rationale -- if you go back in time -- was that there were too many players in the hard drive industry. You could argue that we did a good thing for our shareholders. We basically took our hard drive business, combined it with Maxtor, (and) they got shares of Maxtor. Maxtor's done well. And if our shareholders stuck that out, they got a good return.
Would the market be as good if there were more competitors in the market -- if IBM didn't consolidate, if we didn't consolidate? I don't know. It might not be such a good place to be. We either helped make that happen, or we missed an opportunity. I think we helped make that happen.
Some of the same phenomena exist in these markets as well. There are too many companies in tape drives. For the fact that the market's not growing, having HP and IBM vertically integrated in this business… really doesn't make a lot of sense. Sony (also is vertically integrated). These are big players. These are nits of the business for them. Their success is going to come in bigger battles. This market will hopefully consolidate over time as well.
Do you imagine it will end up being independent vendors like you and StorageTek?
I try to tell people that in every component technology, they've tended to go to a horizontal player. Microprocessors have gone to people like Intel, operating systems have gone to people like Microsoft or open source, graphics chips have gone to people like Nvidia, and disk drives have gone to people like Seagate and Maxtor. Why are tape drives vertically integrated in systems companies? I have no idea -- other than (that) this funny consortium was built.
If it would take the course that the industry has taken, you would think it would go to people like us, StorageTek, etc. That remains to be seen.
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