Talking about the hard drive business with my sponsor, Seagate
Here’s a 30-minute uncut interview with Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate. Disclaimer, Seagate is my sponsor, so I start the interview with “why are you sponsoring my show?”
His answer? That the people he’s interested in reaching (the younger, more tech hip generation) will watch Internet video.
We talk about a variety of other things about what Seagate is trying to do.
Is this an advertisement? Yes. But it’s not like any advertisement I’ve seen on the Internet or on main stream TV.
“This is not your daddy’s disk drive company,” he says.
Some excerpts:
* Seagate had a tough time getting funding back in 1980. Why? The VCs thought no one would want to buy a 5MB hard drive.
* The way Seagate made their new 750GB drive (largest in the industry) is to stand the magnets on end, like a forest of trees, instead of laying them down like has always been done.
* They are going to go beyond just magnetic storage in future generations to build multi-terabyte drives by heating up and cooling the media to enable even tighter storage.
* Seagate is shipping new kinds of storage devices for Windows Vista that combine hard drives and Flash memory, which will speed up the boot time.
* Every TV in the world will have a hard disk on it, or around it, he says.
* “It’s amazing what shit for brains we have in this industry,” he says, when talking about the standards fight between BlueRay and HD-DVD.
* They sell hard drives into Sony’s cameras (and PlayStation 3 too).
* He wants Seagate to help facilitate content distribution. Putting all movies from, say, a movie studio and put them on a hard drive.
* He says he doesn’t shut down his PC and explains why toward the end of the video.
Sorry about the audio on me (you can hear Bill just fine, but hearing me is a bit tough). This should be the last interview that gets up that was done with one microphone (I’m getting much better about using two microphones).
He’s pretty outspoken for a CEO, among the most interesting of all the CEOs I’ve interviewed.
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November 21st, 2006 at 6:31 pm
Who wants to watch you blather on for 30 minutes?! Can’t podtech afford EDITORS?
November 21st, 2006 at 6:50 pm
Peter: it’s pretty obvious you haven’t watched the video (if you had, you’d realize it wasn’t ME blathering on, I just ask the questions). In fact, it’s pretty obvious you haven’t watched any of my videos.
By the way, tens of thousands of people are watching.
Oh, and we have an editor now, Christopher Coulter is up stairs editing my stuff as we speak.
I guess you don’t watch David Letterman, or Charlie Rose, or pretty much any interview show. Those usually go on for an hour.
November 21st, 2006 at 7:16 pm
“The way Seagate made their new 750MB drive (largest in the industry) …”
Don’t you mean GB? Or TB? Because I’m pretty sure that a normal cdrom can hold about 750MB…
November 21st, 2006 at 7:17 pm
MBshould be GB most likely.What do I win?
November 21st, 2006 at 7:21 pm
Robert: My undying respect. :-)
November 21st, 2006 at 8:01 pm
I would love to know what he said in this video. Is there any way I can read transcript or offer subtitle on this video.
Appreciated it.
gwlj
November 21st, 2006 at 8:05 pm
Grant: sorry, I don’t have transcripts. I did give you the highlights above, though. The reason he doesn’t shut down his computer is because hard drives do better to just stay on all the time. Less important today than it used to be, he admits (in the 1980s hard drives could only do about 10,000 starts and stops, today they do about 100,000 or more.
November 22nd, 2006 at 6:42 am
Robert: well, I guess that has some value in the long run. ;-).
November 22nd, 2006 at 1:26 pm
Hmm…for me, this video told me two things:
1. You can’t just ‘go out and do it!’ with video podcasting, because…
2. I’m really not going to watch a 30 minute video while hovering over the volume control like a rabid squirrel, just so I can hear the questions without being deafened by the answers.
I managed about 5 minutes before I gave up, but then to be honest it seemed like a lot of hot air. Most people don’t give a crap about who makes the hard drive in the PC or laptop they buy. It’s a bit like the way movie studios think the average Joe gives a crap if Universal made the film they’re about to watch, or Paramount, or whatever. And I would think that one point about the increasing connectedness and distributed nature of the world we live in, is that the storage devices (hard drives in particular) are pushed further behind ‘the curtain’ - and rightly so.
In my opinion, one way a hard drive manufacturer could differentiate their product is by providing decent software with their external/network storage. I tend to buy Seagate because I’m the exception and know about reliability and warranty periods etc., but a lot of drives (esp. external) come with backup software, and it’s always terrible and a ghastly experience - nowadays I don’t even try to install it. That always seems to drag down the overall UE, but I still kind of like Seagate drives in spite of it.
The other ways I’d like to see hard drives improved are, again esp. with external and NAS drives, form factor, heat and noise. In other words, make them small, neat enclosures which don’t get hot (and kill the drives) or make lots of noise, and which don’t require power brick PSUs.
I have a Buffalo NAS drive (LinkStation) which is awesome - you just plug in a telefunken (figure-8) power cable and an ethernet cable and you’re done. Fiddling around with yet another clunky PSU with yet another bespoke mini-din connector (and making sure I *never* lose it, of course) is such a total pain - I ordered a Buffalo DriveStation, but it came with a power brick so I just sent it back.
So - compact, neat, convenient, quiet, cool.
As an aside, I recently got one of those external Seagate drives of the odd shape, and while it’s not that stackable, it is quiet, and is barely warm to the touch. Comes with a power brick though :(
(I understand some of the above requirements contra-indicate each other, to which I would reply, look at Buffalo LinkStations, and learn).
Also, the software in a lot of NAS drives (the basic sharing facilities, reliability, throughput, etc) often leads a lot to be desired. Too often I’ve read on forums/review pages the phrase “XYZ support have confirmed that this problem is an issue with the software used with this model”. Which means it’s slow, doesn’t work, is unreliable, etc. and often with no indication of a fix coming ever.
I presume you wanted feedback about hard drives ;-)
November 24th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
Interesting feed back Tim, He got it if he wanted it or not.:)
Some definite issues with sound, but most of the recent ones are significantly better.
I love most of your interviews, and it was interesting to hear why they chose to sponsor #1, woops, # 30 (or has it changed again?), without any demands, and he answered that.:)
December 6th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
[...] Robert Scoble’s ScobleShow at PodTech is explicit about its sponsorship by Seagate. Scoble, who famously brought a candid public voice to his previous employer, Microsoft, is fastidious about disclosure. However, he often aims his spotlight on Seagate, a company not often found in the public eye. “Is this an advertisement? Yes. But it’s not like any advertisement I’ve seen on the Internet or on main stream TV,” he writes of an episode devoted to Seagate CEO Bill Watkins. [...]