[jerf]

I'd offer an alternative take, though it's not completely incompatible with the article: They are an example of the fact that you can buy putting your product on front of lots of people, but you can't buy keeping it there. It has to be good on its own merit to survive. Or at least, it gets more and more expensive to hold it in front of people.

It was, in a lot of ways, too early. I never had one, and I never missed having one. I had other solutions to the problems when they happened. By the time I had the problem, it was not a cost-effective solution.

I know people can pop up and say that it solved some problems for them, but I think the people who it solved problems for, in proportion to the price, weren't enough of a market. By the time they were, CD burners were a much cheaper solution.

If they were 1/4 the price, it might have been a different story... but the price was pretty fundamental to the tech.

You can't buy success. You can buy initial success, but not long term success. By the standards of such products, Zip was relatively successful, because it did have some people it solved a problem for. It was just a minority of their customer base. Enough to hang on for a while, but not to take over the world.

[mingus88]

I worked in a university computer lab in the late 90s and these drives were very popular. Burning a CD was not a similar solution.

People needed primary portable storage and Zip drives were amazing solutions before USB drives.

The school gave each student just 15MB of storage for their email account, which was also their homedir storage for any other school project

But the labs had at least a few stations with Zip drives

The article quotes a pretty low failure rate overall but I suspect college students were seeing these fail a lot more because they just threw the disks in their bags and walked around to class all day. Having to deal with someone whose only copy of their work was on one of these triggers a traumatic response in me.

[jerf]

Those were exactly the people I was thinking of when I said it didn't bring enough value. Yes, plenty of students saw a Zip drive bay in their school computers and bought it on the theory that if it was there the schools must know what they were doing and it was a "requirement" of one sort or another. It didn't occur to them that the Zip drives were there because Iomega probably bought their way in, rather than because they were actually a vital tool.

And students may have gotten some minimal, non-zero utility from it, but almost everything they would have been doing at the time would have fit on a floppy disk just fine. Maybe two. The Zip drive was slightly more convenient... for about $150 more. Aroud $300 inflation-adjusted.

That's not $300's worth of value, and especially not $300's worth of value for a college student. I can manage a couple of floppies and "that one time I had a really big project" for $300 as a college student.

Yes, I'm sure you have a story of that one guy who had an 80MB project that fit no other way. But think of all the people who had 96% empty drives because all their documents were tiny that don't come to mind.

You will note that there was no cohort of people coming out of college demanding Zip drives everywhere else in the world after them, because I doubt very many of your students came away with a strongly positive impression of the Zip drive, even for those for whom it worked perfectly.

[orev]

Zip drives arrived at exactly the same time as digital art, the web, and most importantly Macromedia Flash. Maybe the CS people with a few source code files didn’t fully use the space, but the art kids certainly did.

There simply was no other option at the time than Zip drives. Others did not strike the right balance of price, capacity, responsiveness, etc. Maybe Iomega paid to get them installed, I don’t know, but there really was no other option so I can easily see schools buying them just because they needed a solution.

USB thumb drives started appearing not long after, and they didn’t suffer from the click of death, so those became the preferred media by the time those people graduated school.

[ButlerianJihad]

There is no question that Zip Drives succeeded by dominating the shelves of every computer store I ever shopped at. They had a massive share of that all-important real-estate.

This was a market where people were building PCs from no-name components in plain wrapping. Most everything I ordered was out of the back of a trade rag with classified ads that were nothing but tight listings of part numbers and prices. Zip Drive was akin to SoundBlaster in its uniquely flashy, colorful packaging, branded hardware offering.

I eschewed them for a while, and when SyQuest came out with a PC-compatible (and SCSI-compatible) competitor, I picked that up instead. Why? Because SyQuest had imprinted their brand on me when I saw every serious Apple user with a SyQuest on their desk or in their pocket. I knew that this was a tacit testimony of reliability. SyQuest had the necessary experience and R&D already in place to provide quality and reliability, where Zip had none of that reputation.

My SyQuest never failed or clicked, although it became obsolete at the same rate as the Zips. I never regretted not having a Zip drive, for sure!