Our office supplies supplier brought an Imation rep to demo a "new" diskette technology today. Played dumb (Not too tough ;-) and was ready for some fun. In a "short" synopsis, here's what happened:

He brought an external Superdisk drive hooked up to a Pentium laptop and an LS-120 diskette (Superdisk) for the demo with a power point presentation. I let him explain the advantages of the StuperDisk. Every comparison was with Zip. The "advantages" of Stuper were: 1. Backward compatability, thus ease of use for the home and business user, and 2. 20% more storage than Zip. That's it. He stressed that Stuper would be the standard drive and would have 60% market penetration by 2000. 40% of PCs sold are in the home market and ordinary users feel more comfortable with good old floppies. To which I stated that 10 yrs ago, 5-1/4 was what people were comfortable with. OEMs saw advantages of 3-1/2 and put the new standard, over a period of time, on all PCs. If backward compatibility was an issue, people bought 5-1/4 drives as well. I asked what makes this scenario different. Tap Dance. Not enough to convince me.

I asked if the 20% more storage was a major factor, then what's his reaction to 200mg Zip on Zip Plus and future IOM growth with Backward Compatibility. His answer was "uh,uh,uh, well, you have to decide on a standard at some point". What?????

With these two "advantages" debunked, (although some points were valid re: ease of use), I proceeding to ask him some questions and proceed with the demo. Here, the fun begins:

How much do the drive and disks cost? "$329 list, $199 retail (WHAT?). Disks $15-$17" I can get Zip for much less. "We acknowledge that we are 2-1/2 years behind Iomega, but when we start producing in numbers, the price goes down". (Don't ask when that will be) "The only reason for Iomega's success is the publicity they've gotten". (I didn't know bad press made a company successful) "Besides, Zip has only shipped 10mil units. When you look at ALL PCs, that's a very small number" (Wow, I guess SD has sooooo much higher penetration-although he probably includes 1.44)

If Compaq co-developed the SD, why are they and many OEMs going with Zip? You can hardly get a SD pre-installed. "We have been getting OEMs on board such as Gateway and Acer. Dell is now offering SD as an option. NEC Versa series laptop has SD as an option as well. Also Imation is announcing a utilities disk in Jan 98 developed for them by Computer Associates"

I showed him a Dell brochure that just happened to arrive today touting the Zip; no mention of SD. Also, that IOM has included a utilities disk since I can remember. Tap Dance. Not sure about the laptop. Is he full of it or what??? He could only say that sooooo many more people are asking OEMs to include SD as an option, so they will be forced to do so.

Ah, now the demo. He went into Win95 and showed us how easy it was to drag his 5,222KB PowerPoint presentation to D: (SD). We timed this and it took 2min 45sec. Just for kicks, I have a 486/66DX 16mg RAM running Win95 with a PP Zip. I pulled a file from our server, over the network, that was 6,250 or so KB to my PP Zip. 2min 07sec. 20% LARGER file on a SLOWER machine over a NETWORK and STILL kicked StuperDisk hiney!

During his file copy, the drive made this consistently loud, annoying noise. I asked if this was normal; he said it was. The noise was the laser-servo techno-babble blah blah. And I want this slow, noisy piece of crap in my home and office. Right.

Okay, now he will show us how fast and easy it is to pull the PowerPoint presentation off the SD for an actual presentation he has. He double clicks the PPT from D: and we wait. And wait. And wait. After a few minutes, my technician indicates that his system is frozen. CTRL-ALT-DELETE to shut everything down one at a time. After this and rebooting, he tries again. Several minutes go by, then BSOD!!! (Blue Screen of Death). Tried once more. Same thing. I gotta have this drive!!! Oh, yeah!!!

Oh, for the coup de grace. My technician asks for a spec sheet. The very last line on the last page, all by itself says "Do not format HD or DD diskettes in this drive" Another nail in the coffin for backward compatibility.

By the way, why is this guy going through all this trouble. In fact, Imation reps are traveling around to large companies to demo these drives in a grass-roots effort to publicize their product. Unsuspecting buyers with large budgets are eager to spend money on garbage because it's the latest and have heard a good spin on this backward compatibility and 20%>Zip. Couple that with a low VISIBILITY FACTOR (see other posts) that I have noticed as well, and even I have some reason for concern. (Been long on IOM since 11/95) Why isn't IOM doing this? Seems like a lot has been word of mouth. Ask the AVERAGE user what Zip is. The normal buyer of IS equipment may not heard of Zip, but are being exposed to SD, the "latest technology that you can use your legacy 1.44 disks", not knowing that the informed of this world knows that SD stinks??!!

Yes, I know it's a long post, but sometimes a little reality check is in store for this folder. Kiz should be around for entertainment value only, but let's get real. Responding is waste of energy and only fuels his fire.

P.S. The rep feels basically Syquest is a non-threat and that IOM is the only real competitor. Asked about the 200mg Sony I heard about. He said in tests, it could only write 60mg. He stated that it took LS-120 2-1/2 years to be developed and that we probably wouldn't see the drive by Q2 '98. I don't know if basing this only on SD experience is appropriate or not.

Off2Bed, GO IU!

Hoosierfan