I wonder if horse breeders sued Ford way back when the "horseless carriage" was first starting mass production?

This is an idea who's time has come; Seagate better take a lesson for the makers of typewriters. They never got the message on word processors and paid the ultimate price.

Did the typewriter guys have a patent on the qwerty layout? Maybe the fact that hitting a key no longer had a mechanical link to putting ink onto the paper? No matter.

The techniques in storage however have been patented, some of these are not related to the fact that one solution has spinning platters and one is solid state. Seagate spend more $$$ R&D $$$ than most in storage, if the new kids on the block want a piece of the cake, they need to ask the cake maker nicely:)

An unanticipated outcome might be flash memory not using a conventional drive interface at all on high volume products, removing those host systems as a target market for Seagate drives, and accelerating the demise of the high volume hard disk manufacture.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/08/23/seagate_ssd_flash_memory_chips/

The Leica M-Bayonet is out of patent now, and one or two other camera makers have used it.

What we seem to have today is a system of micropatents: not the physical connector, but all the hidden stuff that makes the hardware work.

And Seagate do do the work. This isn't some speculator buying an obscure patent and trying to make money.

Believe me, it's not a good idea to threaten people with strong military connections.

They may take it rather personally. ;->

Seagate knows storage better than anyone, so putting their IP around a SSD surely makes perfect sense?

Anyways, I wonder who has the capacity to manufacture SDD in enough qty to accelerate the price erosion within a time frame that enables the capacity to continue encroaching upon hdd? Don't forget, hdd capacity growth continues too!

"Watkins told the NYT yesterday that one of his goals is to promote cross-licensing deals and partnerships, but a 'sue first, negotiate later' strategy doesn't strike us as the best way of making friends and influencing people."

Even better would be if the company using the patented technology went to the patent holder - before releasing to market - and licensed the technology ahead of time, thereby avoiding said law suit entirely.

I take exception to your statement about Seagate knowing everything there is to know about storage. There are at least 5 corporations that do know a *LOT* more than Seagate. I wouldn't think they are even in the top 10.

Something unusual is going on with drive capacities. As usual, the price of HDD capacity is dropping, but the high price points are not being filled with higher capacity drives. The recent arrival of 500GB 2.5" drives shows that the technology is not yet a limitation.

It's a long time since we used software like Stacker to overcome problems with HDD capacity. Maybe capacities are starting to outgrow demand, and people increasingly find flash drive capacities good enough. If so, it would not be surprising if Seagate now felt squeezed and started lashing out.

"Even better would be if the company using the patented technology went to the patent holder - before releasing to market - and licensed the technology..."

You assume that the manufacturer actually knows what patents are held ! That's one hell of an assumption. Large corporations, and not so large, now use patents as a weapon - the idea being that if you hold enough of them, on obscure topics, with wide-ranging claims, then sooner or later whatever you want to block is bound to infringe on one of them.

OK, so all you have to do is read through the patents, or do a search. Ha ha ! There's thousands, if not millions, of current patents - so that's a problem to start with. And then you get to the scope - have you ever actually tried to read one ?

Note that Microsoft is a prime example of this, they CLAIM that Linux infringes on a couple of hundred of their patents, but will NOT say which ones - because if they say then people can a) apply to have invalid patents declared invalid, and b) just work around them. One of the useful things to come out of the EU documentation settlement is that MS now state which of their patents they claim apply to what bits of their networking.

The only better strategy is if you can have your patents violated by a standard - while "accidentally" forgetting to mention it while the standard is being drawn up. That way you have people in a position where they have to pay you to implement open standards - it's happened.

I would say that it's not practical to find out beforehand what patents may be claimed to apply - so realistically the only way to is carry on and wait till someone makes a claim. Hopefully it will be in the form of "by the way ..." rather than "here's your summons" !

By storage, I mean hard drives. If you have 5 corps that know more than Seagate on drives, please list.

{¯`·.¸_LÅMߤ¥_¸.·´¯} wrote:

"Anyways, I wonder who has the capacity to manufacture SDD in enough qty to accelerate the price erosion within a time frame that enables the capacity to continue encroaching upon hdd? Don't forget, hdd capacity growth continues too!"

You've misunderstood the market. None of that is relevant, nobody is looking to make more chips to sell them cheaper than they do and it would be arbitrary to think price per GB from HDD has to somehow correlate to different storage mediums.

SSD prices will come down fractionally per GB as flash chip bit density rises and die stacking tech becomes more mature. While HDD capacity will rise still, capacity parity won't be important because SSD in a capacity necessary for typical uses will be at an affordable price, so long as Windows 7 doesn't end up following Vista's trend of being all the more bloated than it's predecessor.

A generic answer would be, we'll end up with different forms of solid state memory chips that replace current flash technology before SSDs would ever catch up to mechanical drives in capacity and price simultaneously. They could already match capacity in 3.5" form factor at current density but the price would be prohibitive for anything except a special one-off custom built drive for a wealthy client (can anyone say NASA?).