day 15

what makes the world go 'round 2: wheels of industry

Riddle: what is small, compact, plunging in price faster than the mail-order PC, and selling like Microsoft employment contracts at the annual Apple Computer picnic? What makes the computer world go 'round? The "disk drive." There are all kinds: floppies, diskettes, Winchesters, magneto-opticals, and the wildly popular DVD (Digital Video Disk). But I am talking about the smaller and faster hard drive that fits inside your PC. The plain fact is that hard disk drives are essential to computing. Without them, the modern microprocessor would probably be powering wristwatches and fuel injection systems instead of messing with consumer's pocketbooks. The PC revolution could not have happened without small, fast, and inexpensive disk drives. The graph shown above is the proof. On the vertical axis we have number of units shipped in millions. On the horizontal axis we have time marked off in years until 2004. Notice the curve for disk drive units lies above everything else. Disk drive manufacturing may not be as glamorous as convincing consumers to discard their lowly 180 MHz Pentium in favor of next year's 300 MHz Pentium, but it is truly a booming market segment. It takes a good meal at Fandango's to gain perspective. It takes a clever entrepreneur to capitalize on the rampant disk drive market. If disk drives are the tail that wags the computer dog, then who are the captains of this industry? Why haven't we heard of them, before? Forget Bill Gates - look out for the disk drive barons.

what makes the world go 'round: 1 2 3 4 5 Daily Dose Index