Iomega Clik: Little Disk, Huge Failure

digital cameras started gaining popularity around the turn of the Millennium as image quality improved and prices fell one thing that was still a limitation though was memory card capacity and its Associated cost a prolific storage manufacturer at the time thought it had a killer solution one that failed so badly it hastened the company's demise [Music] [Music] in the late 90s the world wasn't hurting for ways to store data beyond the traditional hard drives and floppy disks many other removable formats came and went something common between all of them was that they weren't exactly pocketable the most popular option iomega zip Drive used discs that were floppy sized and so did most of its competition but mobile technology like digital cameras and MP3 players demanded much smaller media a few companies had tried making devices that used larger disks but to limited success they were certainly clever but a bit unwieldy not only were digital cameras like Sony's mavica series larger than their film-based counterparts carrying several floppies to hold all the images they took was annoying flash media was the obvious solution it was Compact and could hold a decent amount of data being solid state formats like compact flash and smart media were perfect for portable devices as they use little energy to operate and were much more rugged than magnetic discs there was one catch though flash storage was very expensive a digital camera may have only come with an 8 or 16 megabyte card good for a couple dozen photos at most so one needed a computer handy to offload them frequently or shell out for a bigger card the former was a bit impractical if you wanted to take your camera on vacation and the latter was a big Financial hurdle the biggest cards often cost more than the device itself iomega saw opportunity in this conundrum it had seen success with its other storage formats up to that point the ubiquitous Zip drive for general purpose use the high-capacity Jazz Drive targeted at multimedia professionals and the ditto tape drive for personal file archival and backup so when keeping with its catchy one word naming scheme the company released its newest format in mid-199 calling it click it took a page from the zip drive's Playbook and went with floppy disk based media but smaller and higher density much smaller in fact with click disks being about 2 inches or five centimeters on a side this made them a bit bigger than contemporary flash media but not by much and they were thinner than a compact flash card by almost half unlike zip disks they featured a metal enclosure which gave them a reasonably sturdy feel and a rotating shutter to protect the media inside there were two initial options for reading and writing click disks a PC card for laptops and a parallel port based desktop Drive which is what I picked up both required accompanying Windows software and set up with straightforward after a reboot the drive worked like any other but immediately I noticed that transferring files was very slow it took 8 minutes to copy about 28 megabytes of data and that was one of iomega's first missteps with click not offering faster interfaces on its initial drives another was an annoying incompatibility with the company's own external zip drives one couldn't use zip and click drives at the same time which ran counter to iomega's positioning of those formats is complementary that's because click was meant more for holding multimedia files rather than General data storage like Zip a clever feature of the desktop Drive is that it could be pulled from its docking station and used with its matching Flash Reader add-on a nickel metal hydride battery pack snapped to the back and allowed the contraption to be used completely independently of a PC this made for a very clever solution to the digital camera problem with both compact flash and smart media slots one could copy their digital pictures in the field to click disks reformat their flash card and keep on snapping photos there were a few limitations first It could only run off of battery power the power adapter which also worked as a charger connected through the parallel port docking cable so if you weren't confident that the battery would last for your whole vacation you'd have to haul a bit of cable spaghetti with you second was that the reader was a one-trick pony It could only copy from card to click disk and nothing else if you had forgotten to erase your disks before setting out you had no choice but to buy more at your destination maybe that was intentional as iomega definitely seemed interested in recouping its costs sooner rather than later the bundle with drive and flash card reader was reasonably priced at 250 U.S but the media is where the company made a killing about 15 each when bought in smaller quantities or one could pick up a 10 pack for a hundred bucks and that was basically the same price as zip disks with the exception that those held more a hundred megabytes versus clicks 40. that was a hurdle many potential buyers just couldn't get over unless one really needed tiny Media or had interest in the flash card reader there was very little advantage to choosing click perhaps unsurprisingly sales were slow though a production delay pushing back the original launch in late 1998 didn't help if it wanted click to succeed iomega needed to do something it did two things in fact first was simply relaunching the format under a new moniker zip had become a household name so the company leaned into it and renamed click to pocket set this also helped iomega get around a bit of a PR nightmare it had been dealing with a flaw that saw Zip drive suddenly fail had come to be known as the click of death so selling a product name click definitely imparted some negative connotations the second change was further advancing pocketzip's purpose as an alternative to flash media and capitalizing on the rapidly growing MP3 Trend in September 2000 iomega launched the hip zip music player but just like the media it used it went nowhere fast its price of 300 was in line with other MP3 players at the time but the value proposition just wasn't there 40 megabytes of storage per disk was a severe limitation almost laughable at a time when other players could hold dramatically more music for example creative's Nomad jukebox had a six gigabyte hard drive and cost just two hundred dollars more it was an easy choice for most consumers versus the prospect of getting nickeled and dimed with pockets at media and having to carry it all around with them iomega kept trying to push the photography angle too it convinced camera manufacturer agfa to produce a version of its e-photo point-and-shoot that natively used Pockets at media it also finally released a USB version of the drive and announced that it was working on a new generation of disks that could hold a hundred megabytes but that never came to pass by that time the format's ship had sailed flash media prices were falling and capacities continuing to increase and the world was moving on from removable magnetic media even the venerable zip disk was losing Steam and iomega was scrambling CD burners had become affordable and commonplace and the company tried to jump on the bandwagon with its zip CD drives but since they were otherwise normal drives iomega now had a plethora of competition to deal with a position it hadn't really been in before up to that point it had thrived by developing its own technology that was compelling enough to become successful but click was a major flop and ended up being the company's last true Innovation iomega tried to keep relevant by updating the zip format to hold 250 and later 750 megabytes but this Drew little attention eventually it gave up on developing new formats entirely and turned to selling commodity storage products like the zip CD and its Peerless portable hard drive but there was nothing unique about these that caused him to stand out and with an ocean of other manufacturers offering basically the same thing the company started sinking in July of 2001 iomega had posted Financial losses and underwent massive layoffs it pivoted to the network storage Market which eventually caught the attention of Enterprise Computing manufacturer EMC who ultimately acquired iomega in 2008. it continued on for a little while longer but eventually the iomega brand was discontinued in 2013. foreign it's a lesson that technology companies find hard to learn create a hit product that dominates a market segment but then keep innovating in new and different ways to stay relevant what ultimately killed iomega was clinging to its magnetic media routes and failing to embrace the solid-state future storage manufacturers sciquest failed to do this in the 1990s and it was iomega that largely put them out of business it's a bit ironic then that iomega succumbed to the same fate but perhaps not surprising after all as they say old habits die hard [Music] thank you

Channel: This Does Not Compute

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Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 03 2023