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0420.09 Storage Company Seagate's Uncertain Future  By Robert Scoble First, a disclaimer. Seagate is the sponsor of my video show at FastCompanyTV. It has been my biggest partner in the journey I've been on for the past three years and it's been very tough watching my friends there deal with some very tough business issues which ended this week in the ousting of Bill Watkins, CEO. Here's the details on that from CNN Money. Bill is always good for a fun quote and is one of the nicest guys I've met and dealt with in the tech business. He started as a surf bum and moved through the ranks at Seagate. It's an American success story that looked like it would have a great ending. But not this time. One thing I always loved was that Bill said outrageous things. This always made it difficult to find a seat next to him at dinners because press people would jockey to see if he'd say something quotable. But the really outrageous thing he said that probably cost him, and lots of others at Seagate, their jobs is the lack of fire about SSD. Bill never had a very satisfactory answer about SSD and the market doesn't like it when a storage company doesn't have a good answer. That might have made Bill's life tough anyway this year but the economic downturn turned up the heat too much on Seagate. Add into that Bill's lack of fire about the coming economic downturn (in an interview last year he told me he wasn't seeing any downturn) didn't demonstrate authoritative leadership. I really will miss Bill. He was my biggest supporter. He loved social media and gave me my break and not asked much in return. He, and his team, are a dream client. They don't come along very often. It's a bummer to me personally to watch Bill and the executives at Seagate (and other companies, cause most are going through the same tough times) have to negotiate very turbulent waters. Here's what Seagate needs to do to get out of its funk and be in a good position for when the economy repairs itself:
1. Have a good story about SSD. I know they are working on one, but they need to get there and fast. Lots of netbooks (the hottest things at CES) don't have hard drives and are using SSD's instead. Lots of enterprises are putting more and more of their data on SSD-based storage. Seagate needs to have a good answer to these trends and fast. Seagate already has world-class manufacturing experience, which we witnessed close up when we visited its hard drive factory in China. Now it needs to demonstrate it can build other things than just hard drives. 2. Seagate needs to be a bigger player in cloud-based services. Everytime I hear about Amazon S3 or Rackspace's Cloud or Google's App Engine I wonder why didn't Seagate get into that business, especially since Seagate's business is about storage of the world's digital data (it's hard to rip out beliefs that Seagate is a hard drive company). Why not do a partnership with one of these companies to get its brand out there? Most people don't know that these companies use mostly Seagate drives (Rackspace told me they only use Seagates and when I was in a Google data center I only saw Seagate drives). Is there any way they can change that so that they can build a consistent brand across both enterprises and consumer devices? Every Seagate drive should come with a cloud partner built in. Imagine if your Seagate drive built an Amazon S3 service automatically and shared its stuff there? 3. Seagate should either bet the company on consumer stuff, or stay out. I like what it is doing with its HD media sharing device but not putting an HDMI connector on it ensured that Engadget and Gizmodo will not approve. I walked around with Best Buy's strategy guys at the Consumer Electronics show and they want gadgets like that, but they are a lot like Engadget's reviewers. No HDMI? It's going to be tough to get past them. Seagate needs to do what Palm Pre did. Go all the way or don't show up for the game. Also, Seagate should associate itself with all the cool companies that are making devices that use storage, like the new Pogoplug or the Drobo unit that takes multiple hard drives. My photography friends love those and if they came filled with Seagate drives it'd be a good thing all around. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net's Vice President of Media Development. Go to Scobleizer ... |
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