When was the last time you saw a story about disk drives on the cover of The New York Times? I didn’t check the archives, but I’d bet….never.
As a young reporter for Computer Systems News two decades ago I trolled the watering holes and industrial parks of Silicon Valley in search of stories about disk drive companies. I was fortunate enough to establish great, long-time relationships with the founders and senior executives of virtually each and every disk drive vendor — which back in the 1980s was about 50 companies. None of those companies was as much fun to cover as the market leader, Seagate Technologies. The combination of their market leadership, their high-visibility founders (Al Shugart, Finis Conner, Doug Mahon and Tom Mitchell) and the hyper-valuated public stock market for storage companies made it a treasure trove for a reporter.
Still, that was 20-plus years ago. And I was stunned when I walked into a local Dunkin Donuts early Saturday morning to pick up my coffee, only to glance at the Times’ front page and see an odd headline: “Chinese Seek To Buy a U.S. Maker of Disk Drives.”
Seagate let it be known that the company had been approached by an unnamed Chinese technology company to inquire about a possible acquisition — something CEO William Watkins said the U.S. government was “freaking out” over.
I don’t know if this will come to pass, but my first-blush reaction is a bit dumbfounded. Not that data storage isn’t an important technology, but it seems to me that any real threat to national security — as some industry pundits and government officials are worried about — would be more likely to come from software technology, such as encryption, identity management or even storage management. As much as I loved covering the disk drive industry, it’s essentially hardware. And successfully churning out disk drives requires a stronger manufacturing process and production-yield know-how than the Chinese are believed to have today. I know Seagate has invested a lot in software over the years, but Seagate’s primary focus, by far, is churning out devices. I won’t be naive enough to think there’s nothing in Seagate’s advanced technology that the Chinese wouldn’t be keenly interested in acquiring, but why do I get the feeling this is another instance of a few xenophobes in the State and Commerce Departments worried about Chinese companies buying into the U.S. computer industry, like Lenovo did when it bought IBM’s PC division?
I’d be a lot more worried if China was thinking about buying Symantec or CA or Novell.
