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The Company designs and markets products and provides services that help its customers store and protect its valuable digital information. The Company organized its products into three categories: Consumer Products, Business Products and Other Products.
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pigsfeet007 (98.64) Submitted: 6/12/07 12:58 AM : Start Price: $3.74 IOM Score: -13.16
Let me tell you a hard lesson a young investor learned a few years ago. I knew this guy who was a young and interested investor. This guy did not know much about trend lines or p/e rations but he knew technology. He knew that Iomega was positioned to become the new standard replacing the dinosaur A:/ drives. People were lining up to buy these cool zipdrives. Heck, Dell was the first to sign a deal with Iomega to become a standard component in their systems, with Gateway coming to the table shortly thereafter. Iomega was rockin, they couldn't make these things fast enough for the demand. Everything was looking great and this young investor was already counting his money UNTIL.... Iomega starts spending millions of dollars to on a cheesy advertising campaign starring Leslie Nielsen. This drove the demand for zipdrives even higher forcing Dell to ship their systems with old A: drives. Guess what, by the time IOM was ready to crank these things out the war was over. The CDRW had won. This management team of monkeys botched the chance to become THE STANDARD media drive in computers. They blew all their cash on a naked gun gimmick advertising campaign instead of figuring out how to supply the demand that was already there. How could anyone ever trust this company to perform?
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peanut46 (< 20) Submitted: 7/17/07 5:51 PM
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Get on with it. Sounds like sour grapes to me.
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mingusdew (98.84) Submitted: 8/17/07 9:45 PM
With or without bad advertising, they would have lost to the CDR eventually. IIRC, these commercials aired around the time Napster was making music downloads easy and accessible, and without ipods the only way to listen to your new mp3 files away from your PC was on a CDR. Not to mention, CD recording technology dropped in price fairly rapidly, to a point where discs were so cheap you could just throw them away without second thought if they were ever damaged. It's 2007 and zip disks are still no less than $6 each, with the drives costing about 5x that of a CD burner. I realize their current status as a niche technology probably has an impact on their pricing, but I still don't recall a time past '98/'99 where Zip drives were a better value than CDR.And then there's Zip's failure rate...
phi16 (99.43) Submitted: 8/29/07 9:10 AM
I was well entrenched in the microcomputer business during those days and witnessed the same management stupidity. Image Iomega people walking around a computer show with buttons reading "New York sucks". I had no idea what that was about (the show was in Boston) but I wonder what that did for its New York sales. There was a time when this company could have ruled the world. Instead, they squandered that lead. That was a long time ago, though ('97). I wonder if the same team is still in charge.
pigsfeet007 (98.64) Submitted: 9/02/07 11:02 PM
The zip disk were not competing with CDR at the time. It was hard for an average user to make a boot CD. Furthermore, CDRW's were expensive at time. People were still used to having an A:/ drive and the zip was positioned to take over. They spent all their cash on advertising because they expected their competition, which manufactured a product that was also compatible with 3 1/2" disks, to put up more of a fight. In sum, they blew it.
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