Re: Well better that than what happened to Kodak
Insofar as the two can be directly compared, I suspect the hard drive market is more like the film market during the 2000s than the 1990s- the changeover is *already* well under way, and it's open to question whether anyone who'd left it this late to *start* adapting had already left it too late.
Of course, I don't know whether or not WD has already been working behind the scenes.
Unlike the film business, I suspect that the HDD business will die completely when flash gets within sniffing distance in price/size terms (not helped by the fact that HDD will lose the economies of scale). There will (I'm guessing) probably still be niche uses that HDD would be preferable for, but I'm not sure they'll be enough to economically support a scaled-down industry.
(On the other hand, the fact that film is still viable as a *niche* product didn't change the fact that a company like Kodak that had been built around selling it in mass-market quantities was going to be in trouble regardless, unless they adapted quickly enough. Spoiler- as we all know, they didn't.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
