Comments on: Take your tech recession and stuff it

Investors may be panicking, but Seagate CEO Bill Watkins says business and tech trends paint a different picture than the one on CNBC.

[johngallagher]

Typical CEO

Ooops, my bad. Sorry you got layed off, my mistake and it didn't need to happen. And it has cost the company profits and stressed out the remaining workforce to make the numbers. But now we can say there is a recession and hire you back with less pay and benefits. Or better yet, out source your job!

[kgsbca]

Hardly a typical CEO

Watkins is one of my favorite CEOs (the list is very small, most are just politicians, and I do not like politicians), and Seagate is one of my favorite stocks (even though they are grossly undervalued by analysts and stockbrokers). You're expecting him to not make mistakes, that is impossible. At least he admitted it, unlike most CEOs and politicians, who will try to spin their way out of any blame.

And speaking of spinning, he is uncharacteristically (for a CEO/politician) forthright in his comments on encrypted drives - he admits he has a bias in favor of using those drives because he sells them.

Watkins is unique among executives - he understands his business, and is not just a manager. Don't paint him with the same brush as the bean counters that run most other companies, who increase profits the way you described.

[co_z]

Hard drive failure is not a big issue?

"if you look at the returns why PCs fail to come back, the hard drive is not the No. 1 or 2 issue"

This is utterly false, especially when dealing with laptops. In my experience hard drives are the #1 failure point in laptops - hard drive often have a shorter life span than batteries.

This sounds like a way for Mr. Watkins to pitch how reliable his products are.

I think a lot of people who have been burned with multiple laptop hard drive failures will switch to solid state once the capacity matches traditional drives.

[Mycroft_514]

Actually, in my experience, he's right.

I'm on my 5th laptop now (upgrading for performance each time.)

Failures (each once, and spread across machines):

1. Power supply
2. cover hinge
3. virus
4. Motherboard failure
5. DVD drive failure

And that is over a 20 year span from first laptop to now.

[jscott418]

Smaller form factor affects durability

I think the smaller hard drives and the environment that laptops
function in has more to do with failures. All of a sudden we have
become backup user's? I see external hard drives for sale all over
the place. What is needed is a second hard drive in a laptop to
serve as a backup drive. Too many of us fail to carry with us a
external drive along with our laptops.

[Phillep_H]

Failures

Laptop batteries are the worst, followed by the wiring to the display on the laptop. Floppy drives and CD drives in laptops are next, with desktop drives after.

Hard drives have been pretty reliable.

[mjvtz]

Lap&Desk Top drives fail excessively

and they have been since the manufacturers lowered their warrantee period from three years to one year ... failure rate on business machines are much lower because they dont want to lose bulk purchasers ... so the drives (and other components) that test out marginally go into "home" computers ... duhhhhh