I was giving some thought about whether or not I should purchase another external hard drive, and for some reason Iomega popped into my head. Sure, they were big in the ‘90s with their Zip Drives when CD burners were too expensive for many consumers. The Zip Drive was great for its time, touting a much higher storage capacity than the floppy, at a whopping 1.44 MB, if anyone still remembers the floppy. However, when CD burners were actually becoming more affordable – on par with the cost of a Zip Drive – the tide started to change, the Zip Drive not so much.

Believe it or not, Iomega is actually still selling the Zip Drive. Sure, it tried to evolve and keep up with the storage capacity that CD burners offered at 700 MB per disc, moving from 100 MB to 250 MB and then eventually 750 MB. But, you’ve got to wonder, at $99.99 (retail) for either the Zip 250 MB or Zip 750 MB, why would anyone not use the DVD Burner they have, which can store 4.7 GB or 9.4 GB (dual-layer) and are less expensive than what Iomega has to offer to the average consumer?

Where did Iomega lose touch with the average consumer?

Iomega boasts that there are over 50 million Zip Drives sold worldwide. For every computer there is either a CD or DVD drive, many of which also can burn files to disc, Iomega’s penetration with the Zip Drive got stifled. I remember the Zip Drive being integrated into the Macs in the mid-90s, which was great considering the Mac was the platform to use for graphic design, and let’s be honest, images fitting on a floppy was severely limited.

Then, there’s functionality, usability, and versatility. Aside from storing computer data the Zip Drive was limited in what it could do – software, music, movies didn’t come on Zip Drives, but they did come on CD and DVDs. With Iomega touting 50 million Zip Drives worldwide, odds are that you don’t know someone who has one, but there is someone who has a CD Player, DVD Player, computer – devices that can read the media. That, combined with a higher capacity really pushed the Zip Drive and Iomega into obscurity.

Fast forward a few more years and you have jump drives and memory cards that come in capacities that can be largerthan a Zip Disk at a fraction (fraction would be doing the comparison a diservice), that are also cheaper than what Iomega is currently selling Zip Drives and Floppy Drives for.

Iomega’s Response

Iomega has responded and tried to evolve its consumer product base by branding CD Burners, which I would have to say created not only brand confusion, but hurt the brand. It also showed that Iomega conceded, much like New Coke without the outcry, in that a Zip Drive could not and would not be the de facto standard for data storage.

Iomega’s most recent offering for data storage is the Rev Drive, which Iomega claims is “revolutionary” – probably the same way Windows Vista was revolutionary. “Revolutionary” comes with a bit of a price tag. A $399.99 pice tag. For that price, you could more than purchase a 1 TB External Hard Drive. I’ll be fair though, I haven’t used the Rev Drive, but I do not see the need for one, but at $399.99 is a bit out of reach. Maybe for small businesses, but an initial $399.99 price tag to begin data storage is kind of pricey.

To be more fair, the Rev Drive is not intended (or so it seems) to be a device that replaces an external hard drive (?) – correct me if I’m wrong, because personally, I wouldn’t want to live through swapping out discs again to play music, movies, or find files. The Rev Drive would be useful for storing absolute/static data – data that does not change – because it could be used in a linear fashion.

After reading a bit about the Rev Drive, Iomega touts “ password protection, encryption and removable disks make it more secure and flexible than an external hard disk drive.” Yes, Iomega scores a point in that it is more secure than an external hard disk drive because a thief would have to spend $399.99 to even try to begin reading your data. Well-earned point.

The Rev Drive hasn’t stopped Iomega from convoluting their brand so that consumer really don’t know what the company does though as they’ve stepped up into the external hard drive space. Logically, it makes sense, but not with their current offerings (explained in What Iomega Needs To Do). Iomega can expect to face a challenging time in the external hard drive space unless they can offer something that is extremely compelling. Traditional manufacturers of hard drives have decided to expand their businesses from internal hard drives to external hard drives, which allows them to cut costs on the cost of drives – Iomega needs to step up in this space if they want to be a contender.

Iomega does offer other small-busienss/enterprise level services, but seeing as how I’m not involve with that aspect and am perfectly content with the solution of external hard drives, I’ll skip over the other part of their business.

What Iomega Needs To Do

Iomega needs to redefine its brand and let certain products gracefully die the death they should have about 10 years ago, mainly the Zip Drive. Like the Walkman, the Zip Drive was great for its time, but you don’t see Sony still trying to sell cassette-based portable music devices and trying to push that as remotely modern. The longer Iomega continues to advertise, sell, and talk about the Zip Drive, the more they remain stuck in the past as they’re still trying to live it up in the ‘90s. By continuing to advertise the Zip Drive and the Floppy Drive on their site, there is confusion that lingers around Iomega’s brand as well as the notion that the brand has lost relevancy. I don’t believe there is a television company that has a black and white television in their current product line up, so why does Iomega still have the floppy? Once Iomega drops the Zip Drive and the Floppy Drive from their site, they can begin to reposition themselves as a leader in data storage solutions.

Currently rocking out to:

The National - "Guest Room"

Ironically enough, I started writing this from Word 2008 for Mac and was too annoyed with the lack of speed that was in Office 2008. I was excited that Microsoft was going to be releasing a Universal Office Suite for the Mac – having used Office 2004 on an Intel-based Mac, well, doing work was nowhere near responsive as its Windows counterpart.

I was more excited to see speed improvements and enhancements made to Excel – I pretty much stare at spreadsheets all day and do find working in Excel on Windows to be somewhat limiting, i.e. the lack of the free floating Windows.

One addition to Excel 2008 that I was quite excited to see was that there are now over 1 million rows that are supported. Yes, over 1 million rows, and columns that extend out to XFD. However, keep in mind that anything over 65k you’ll have to save it in the new format “.xlsx,” which of course, is not backwards compatible with older versions of Excel. A welcomed surprise with the new .xlsx file extension is its ability to save space. Having previously been limited to 65k rows per worksheet, housing a year’s worth of sales data becomes not only cumbersome, but also quite big, with a file size coming in at 145mb. Consolidating all that data into one worksheet and saving it in the .xlxs format shrunk it down all the way to 45 mb.

Aside from the additional rows, I’ve yet to see any real speed improvement over Excel 2004. It’s still sluggish and takes quite a bit of time to work with large data sets, albeit it is an improvement over what I have work, but then again, I am still working on a Pentium 4 processor (a glorified Pentium Pro), whereas I thought having an Intel Core 2 Duo processor would show significant speed gains. I was wrong or I may need a MacPro to run Office 2008 the way it was meant to be run.

The UI isn’t too terrible, you won’t be lost with a “What do I next?” reaction that’s for sure. Microsoft has added a row above the columns bar that consists of “Sheets,” “Charts,” “SmartArt Graphics,” and “WordArt,” which I doubt I’ll be using anytime in the near future, but can be quite useful for people who are not frequent users of spreadsheets. I’m still a fan of the free-floating windows that is a main staple in the Mac OS.

Excel no longer opens with three worksheets by default, but one, which is quite nice, as there are many cases where I really don’t need three worksheets. Another nice addition is that a “+” icon has been added next to the worksheets tab to quickly add worksheets should you need them.

One quick tidbit on Pivot Tables, don’t expect to take advantage of having Pivot Tables that take up lots of rows — I tried dragging a data field that was about 265k rows, but the Pivot Table was not having any of it.

Word is still Word, I can’t be quite too sure on how much you can exactly elaborate on a word processor, however, the response time appears to be just a tad bit sluggish – typing input does not exactly feel real-time, but slightly delayed, which can seem quite annoying when you are typing.