Melissa Bockhold Heather Coddington - Franklin College

to twelve months, is a new opportunity for suppliers to gain sales relationships with new
customers and to continue selling to past customers. Typically, each customer uses only
a few disk drive suppliers at any given time. At the beginning of the new product cycle,
customers pre-select the suppliers they will use for the upcoming year. Customers
execute this process based on pre-announced performance and reliability requirements
and the availability of new products at the time of pre-selection. If a manufacturer does
not have new products to test or good performance to offer customers at this critical time,
they could potentially lose up to a year’s sales. Perhaps an even more serious
repercussion is the potential for damaging sales relationships with customers (Andrade
3).
D. Products
Disk drive manufacturers have explored new products and avenues to remedy the
lag in revenue growth, mentioned in the above section on competition in the disk drive
industry.
One area explored was storage networking. With the presence and prolific use of
the internet, email, and video and audio applications, options for larger and more efficient
data storage are increasingly necessary and in demand. Storage Area Networks (SAN)
and Network Attached Storage (NAS) are sophisticated options that manufacturers can
differentiate in the market and offer to the consumer (Andrade 3).
The other option is to enter the consumer electronics market. As consumer
products evolve, more and more data storage is necessary. Video data storage devices
(i.e. TiVo ® ), music storage devices (i.e. iPod ® ), video games consoles (i.e. Xbox ® ), and
personal computers are examples of products for this market. While the year 2000
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