BillWatkins
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Ex-Seagate CEO joins startup Vertical Circuits, learns secret of the silver, gadget-shrinking ooze
Bill Watkins, the oft-outspoken former CEO of Seagate, has thrown his support behind tech startup Vertical Circuits, who claim to have an uncanny knack for shrinking gadgets with the power of voodoo -- or rather, a patented silver ooze, but we prefer our theories. The goo works as a replacement for gold wires to connect vertically stacked chips, cleaning up the internal cable clutter and leaving more room for better processor, bigger batteries, larger displays, or just a tinier form factor. Right now the focus is on stacking flash memory, but the group says they can use the same technique for processors and other chips. At this stage, there's no product or partnership to show for it, but if they're as good as they say, we hopefully won't have to wait long to see the fruits of their labor.
Seagate developing mutant hybrid SSD tech to bring costs down
We'd heard that Seagate was prepping its first solid state hard drives, but there was no plan for consumer-friendly products in that vein anytime soon because solid state drives cost far more to produce than the conventional variety. Recently, CEO Bill Watkins hinted that the company intends to overcome that problem by combining relatively inexpensive (but unreliable) multi-layer cells with pricier (but dependable) single-layer cells in some kind of hybrid drive technology. It's all very pie in the sky right now, but surely it's a better hope than sticking to your old fashioned ways and seeking out opportunities to sue envelope-pushing competitors.[Via Electronista]
Seagate to jump into the SSD game, 2TB spinners planned for next year
SSDs are the new heat, and while all sorts of upstarts have been cranking them out old-school drive manufacturer Seagate has mostly sat it out and made a lot of noise about patent lawsuits. The lawsuits aren't going away (obviously), but CEO Bill Watkins told PC World yesterday that the company is finally getting ready to release its first SSD sometime next year, as well as launch a line of 2TB traditional hard drives. Watkins said that SSDs weren't yet price-competitive for consumers (uh, yeah), and that Seagate won't focus on consumer SSDs until the price falls to the 10-cents-per-GB level. Until then, the target market is data centers looking to process data quickly or save on energy consumption costs -- the rest of us will just have to save our pennies, apparently.
CE-Oh yes he did! Part XXII - Watkins apologizes for Ce-Oh no Part XIX
Finally man, a tech exec cuts through the heaps of banal press statements and glad-handing interviews to stand up and tell it like it is -- and boom, dude gets eaten alive. Yeah, we're talking about Bill Watkins, who was recently quoted as saying, "Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn." Damn skippy Bill, you done the deed, now don't back out! Well, too late; apparently Bill sent out a memo to his company apologizing for the statement: "... unfortunately, and unwisely, I also used pornography as an example to illustrate a point. Fortune Magazine chose to focus narrowly on this example in their headline." Well, c'mon, you can't fault everybody for focusing in on the sound bite; but if you want to take a lesson in the school of stonewalling, without naming names we've got a few good coaches we could send your way.
CE-Oh no he didn't! Part XIX - Watkins says Seagate "helps people buy crap... and watch porn"
Unexpected candidness is a recurring theme of our CE-Oh no! series of posts, but this latest example from Bill Watkins, the CEO of Seagate, truly takes the biscuit. At a recent corporate dinner in San Francisco, the Texan CEO produced a quotable line edgy enough to give any PR people in the immediate vicinity an instant heart attack. In his exact words: "Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn." We're gonna have to give the guy a break for two reasons: a) alcohol was readily available, and b), all those naughty digital photos have gotta be stored somewhere, and Seagate is in the digital storage business. Besides, the rest of Watkin's quotes are relatively thought provoking: his views on media distribution ("It's the content that's important"), Dell's problems -- no, not those ones -- ("They don't understand the consumer"), and other areas of the technology industry appear to be fresh and honest. Maybe just a bit too honest this time around.
