Shares of both Seagate and Western Digital are getting battered on fears that the hard-drive sector could once again soon find itself with a glut of supply.
At least in part, the Street is reacting to this morning’s downgrade of Marvell by Barclays Capital, which as I noted earlier was in response to indications from Taiwanese component makers of a slowdown PC demand.
Toshiba Corp. is in talks to buy Fujitsu’s hard disk drive business–a deal that would be worth $340 million to $450 million. Fujitsu was previously in talks with Western Digital to sell the business but those talks fell apart last year.
Seagate CEO Bill Watkins is feeling pretty good about the hard disk market. His Asian competitors–mostly Toshiba, Fujitsu and Samsung–are in bad shape, he says, and may have to work together in order to survive. External drive sales are doing well, but the solid-state drive market isn’t gaining the traction that was predicted. Could end up being good news for Seagate.
Google’s preeminence in Silicon Valley is largely due to its ability to offer advertisers a way to hawk their messages against contextually relevant keywords. The plain-text advertising messages, which aim to peddle everything from broadband connections to litigation services, have worked well enough to make Larry and Sergey mega-billionaires (the current nosebleed-inducing decline not withstanding) of the rarest kind.
If in the first eight years of the 21st century contextual text advertising has proven to be the magic potion, then it is safe to say that the next decade or so is going to be about location-relevant advertising and marketing messages.
Having seen Apple’s MacBook Air notebook computer up close, I’m as dazzled as everyone else who’s had a chance to examine this delicious piece of industrial design. Dazzled doesn’t translate to handing over a credit card, however–at least not yet, and not solely because it’s almost never a good idea to buy Apple’s (or anyone else’s) hardware immediately after its initial release.
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