Seagate poised to swallow LaCie, haul fattened bod into channel Spinning disk supremo Seagate has nailed down an agreement from Paris-based external drive products manufacturer LaCie to snap it up, and LaCie is up for it – though the trade union and regulatory stuff is still being worked out. If the transaction completes, Seagate will be able to round out its mainstream consumer storage …
With Samsung and LaCie drive businesses sucked up into the Seagate black hole, it will not be long before we've a M$/Windows monopoly in the drive business. Even before Samsung was absorbed there were too few remaining drive manufactures for effective competition.
Moreover, with Seagate's ever-increasing drive monopoly, imagine what'd happen if we had a repeat of the Seagate's 7200.11 drive BIOS problem--this time with orders of magnitudes more drive of one type in the field.
(I personally had about 15 drives fail because of this fault and Seagate never fixed the problem despite new BIOSes.)
I was there very early on with LaCie, when they first started they sold external HD's aimed at the Mac market. It was good value and good kit, they were also a really good company to deal with.
As always that diluted over time and they became less personal and overpriced compared to the competition, but targeted the mac market, where cost was less important than brand and looks (the stark drives were overpriced but sold well because they looked so cool!}.
I'm pretty amazed at the sales figures, but Jolly Good Luck to the plucky French (how often do you hear that!).
Swallowed up?
Maybe cashed in is more appropriate (and well done!). Just another cash rich company gobble up of small scale competition surely?
Can't see it been a good thing for the brand long term.
I choose LaCie as a manufacturer for the same reason I choose many suppliers - their technical support. Never had a bad experience, competent and flexible, although in fairness I've probably had to use their support more than I ought to, which does bring in to question the build quality. New power supply anyone?
I suspect the support will be the first thing to get flushed away, like an expensive cache.
Si.
(Mines the one with the "My other external drive is block-paved" badge)
Sigh. LaCie was one of the last decent manufacturers making decent 2.5" external drives without any additional driver crap that makes them *require* windows XP/7 or OSX 10.
Unlike Western Digital or Seagate.
Which is sod all use when you need to use the drive at bios level, on Windows Server 2003/2008, or with a linux distribution.
Seriously what is so difficult about making a plain old boring hard disk in a box.
Good for whom ? Is there any evidence that indicates that LaCie lacked the financial resources to invest in their products and bring new and hopefully innovative ones to the market ? It may be a good deal for M Spruch personally, in that he, according to the article, cashes in to the tune of some €94 million, and good for Seagate in that they get both Spruch and the LaCie label, which latter still retains some market cred, deserved or not. But how LaCie being incorporated into Seagate, which is not exactly known for the quality of its products, is a good deal for users is more difficult to understand. But perhaps Chris Mellor's perspective is not that of the user ?...
Henri
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