
Errr - "Clever" ??
Where do you get the idea that Adaptec is clever ?
You report it made a loss for fiscal 2008 - the company has made huge losses for the last 4 - 5 years and their current revenues are about 1/10th of what they were.
As for the purchase of of Aristos, have you realised that this is at least the 5th RAID company Adaptec have bought ? What happened to the people and skills of all the others ? Adaptec's workforce shrinkage (about 75% total, in Europe about 97%) means that as a supposed RAID company Adaptec no longer had internal R&D (let alone maintenance) skills.
This looks like a purchase forced on Adaptec by Steel Partners who last year thought they were investing in a RAID company - then found out they'd been scammed.
Little tweaks of technology like this are all that's left to Adaptec. They've completely lost the RAID on motherboard business, they have zero OEM business and their once impeccable reputation in the industry is now lower than Gordon Brown's popularity.