Industry Eye the industry eye

The Fall of the Fabulous Floppy?


by John Boyd

Can it be true that the faithful old floppy disk has reached the end of its tracks and is about to crash out of the scene?

The 3.5-inch data diskettes that have been fed by the score into millions of PCs, not to mention slipped into countless shirt pockets and purses, have served the computing world well for the past decade. But alas, the venerable floppy is now showing i ts frailty. Its gaunt 1.4MB capacity is no longer credible in this era of multimedia applications, Microsoft bloatware, and the gluttonous Web browser from Netscape that can gobble up 30 MB if you use all the plug-ins.

No wonder, then, that the industry has been deserting the floppy and signing on with alternative technologies that offer far greater storage capacities. With CD-ROM drives on most desktops and now appearing in new notebook computers, the CD-ROM's 650M B of roomy storage has made it the darling of software vendors for distributing their voluminous intellectual output. What's more, with the price of CD-R (CD-ROM Recordable) drives expected to fall sharply as competition grows, corporate users will quickl y take them up. You may only be able to write once to these discs, but that still makes them ideal for permanent records (not to mention a compact replacement for 400 floppies).

Technology marches on

On the horizon, Japanese electronics manufact urers are gearing up to launch CD Erasable drives, an event that also threatens to erase the floppy. Not that impatient power users need wait: Matsushita Electric, through its Panasonic brand, is already marketing a phase-change drive that uses a 650MB re movable, rewritable disk (PD). The PD drive also conveniently doubles as a 4X CD-ROM drive. Compaq and Matsushita are shipping some PC models incorporating the PD drive, and Panasonic and other Japanese manufacturers are marketing external drives for the Macintosh and PC in Japan and the US.

Competing directly with the PD are the MO (magneto-optical) drives from Fujitsu, Sony, and others. Besides its new 640MB MO drive, Fujitsu has managed to squeeze a 230MB MO drive into notebooks. Apple is one computer vendor offering the MO drive as an optional replacement for floppies in some of its portables.

While all these technologies have found supporters, others are waiting to see how the Digital Versatile Disk (DVD; formerly known as the Digital Video Disk) pans out. The DVD can be described as a next-generation CD-ROM with the awesome capacity of 4. 7GB -- the equivalent of over 3,000 floppies, and big enough to hold 135 minutes of quality MPEG2 compressed video.

Toshiba, a leader in DVD, should have launched a DVD player for the consumer market by the time you read this. Come autumn, Toshiba says it will ship a DVD ROM drive for PCs -- which, in time, will threaten CD-ROMs, never mind the floppy. Toshiba also maintains it is on track to deliver a DVD Rewritable drive in 1997. However, there are still some technical points to clear up, and the not-so-minor detail of allaying Hollywood fears about the impact this roomy digital replicator could have on the movie industry's ability to protect its intellectual properties.

The floppy reborn?

With this plethora of choices, the floppy is about to flop out, right? Far from it. Visit almost any computer store in Tokyo's Akihabara electronics district, and yo u will see shelves crammed with second-generation floppy drives from Iomega and its Japanese licensees selling for around ¥20,000. The Iomega Zip
drive is almost as fast as a hard disk, can store 100MB, and comes with handy software utilities. Io mega has already sold a million Zip drives, mostly in the US, and looks to be repeating that here.

Iomega's closest competitor is Syquest. However, Syquest's 130MB EZdrive is based on Winchester hard disk technology, where the read/write head flies over the disk's surface, unlike the floppy's head, which actually brushes the disk.

And Iomega soon faces new competition from rival floppy technologies. 3M has come out with the LS-120 Drive, which holds 120MB and is being manufactured by Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics. Compaq is the first PC vendor to support the LS as a standard feature on some new DeskPro models, and will sell it separately as a $210 option. Despite coming late to the removable storage party, the LS has one major advantage: it is backwards compatible with current floppies, unlike the Zip. (Nevertheless, lack of compatibility may not dampen the Zip's momentum, especially now that IBM has begun incorporating it into one of its Aptiva models.)

Meanwhile, another Japanese electronics manufacturer, Mitsumi Electric, will soon announce a third competing second-generation floppy technology with a capacity of 128MB. Three incompatible technologies may cause market confusion, but it does suggest that despite sexier MO, PD, and DVD optical technologies, the fabulous floppy will continue to rotate with the best of them.

John Boyd is Tokyo correspondent for Information Week and writes the weekly "Computer Corner" column in the Japan Times. He can be reached at 6840615@mcimail.com.

About John Boyd