Never Say Never...

I remember in 1986ish, while attending something at EMC's brand spanking new two-story building in Hopkinton, MA (the first of many), Dick Egan said "in 5 years there will be no need for disk drives".  He knew that all storage would be put on RAM.

I believed him.  I don't anymore.  Not even the brilliant Dick, as I affectionately refer to him as, is right all the time.  In his case, thank god it didn't - if it weren't for Symmetrix, the poor guy might have only become Ambassador to  Guam instead of Ireland.  The economics vs. capacity demand never worked out.

I think you may say the same thing today about tape.  I'm going to be that the result will be the same - you'll never hit the right cost vs. capacity metric to totally obviate the need for tape.  Even more, once I show you how to stop making tapes that contain 98% of the same data each time, you'll be able to spin way fewer tapes, hence saving a boatload of money.

Dave Hitz, super genius and generally entertaining guy, wrote about the potential of Flash instead of disks in this blog - interesting idea.  Dave's point is the same as mine, the economics won't bear it out - but his other point is "who cares"?  I like Dave.

So never say never my friends.  Pretty soon it will all be holographic anyhow....