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fifteen year expense of developing it, the firms that led in this technology were the leading, establisheddisk drive manufacturers.Because of the risk involved in the technology’s development and its potential importance to theindustry, the trade press began speculating in the late 1970s about which competitor would lead withthin-film heads. How far might conventional ferrite head technology be pushed? Would any drivemakers get squeezed out of the industry race because they placed a late or wrong bet on the new headtechnology? Yet, it turned out, whether a firm led or followed in this innovation did not make asubstantial difference in its competitive position. This is illustrated in Figures 6.1 and 6.2.Figure 6.1 shows when each of the leading firms introduced its first model employing thin-film headtechnology. The vertical axis measures the recording density of the drive. The bottom end of the linefor each firm denotes the maximum recording density it had achieved before it introduced a model witha thin-film head. The top end of each line indicates the density of the first model each companyintroduced with a thin-film head. Notice the wide disparity in the points at which the firms felt it wasimportant to introduce the new technology. IBM led the industry, introducing its new head when it hadachieved 3 megabits (Mb) per square inch. Memorex and Storage Technology similarly took aleadership posture with respect to this technology. At the other end, Fujitsu and Hitachi pushed theperformance of conventional ferrite heads nearly ten times beyond the point where IBM firstintroduced the technology, choosing to be followers, rather than leaders, in thin-film technology.Figure 6.1 Points at Which Thin-Film Technology Was Adopted by Leading Manufacturers, Relativeto the Capabilities of Ferrite/Oxide Technology at the Time of the SwitchSource: Data are from various issues of Disk/Trend Report.103