I wish somebody had written a book about why they made the (extremely poor) decisions they did.

In retrospect, it seems really hard to keep iterating on the next proprietary Zip/Jaz drive technology as a single company when your competition is basically everyone else who are collectively working on portable storage with wider adoption rates.

If they'd licensed disks at say $1, and the drives at $10, and let other companies build compatible products, it would have lived a lot longer and they may have even influenced the transition to USB thumb drives.

I worked in 2nd level phone support at one time, but had no insight into anything the company did. Aside: the Jazz drive was effectively a detachable internal drive, where the disks came out. A damaged drive could damage the disks, and damaged disks could damage the drive. When an RMA happened, I'd usually do both.

In the end they had some really good engineering, and a lot of missed opportunities.

If they'd never embarked on that ill-fated idea, and instead continue to put all of their wood behind zip drives (and maintaining compatibility), they could've done better. I agree that licensing would've helped a lot. The zip disks were simply too expensive, and they always felt like a proprietary format in a way that 3.5" floppies did not. I was only a teenager at the time but even I was thinking "So wait, this one company is the only manufacturer? Seems niche, not the guaranteed next thing."

I remember zip disks being around. The disks were too expensive and the drives, especially so. I used a disk or two at school but never bought one for myself. We had a server at school we could upload/download files to (or just log into directly) so there was never much point.

I also remember CD-RWs being terribly unreliable, and sufficiently costlier than a one-use CD-R that basically no one ever used them. I certainly didn't. What a mess of thrown-away plastic all those CD-Rs were (and remember how if you used the computer for anything else while it was burning and it ran out of buffer the CD-R was ruined?). It certainly felt like a regression from the earlier days of rewritable disks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pBhEaMp8mw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4hQeWtkTC8

My impression is that they were seen as fragile, people feared losing one was like losing whole boxes of regular floppies. A single floppy was fragile, so you made backups of it, but backing up a ZIP disk was slower and impractical because they were more expensive compared to burning CDs.

To the best of my knowledge, Iomega's big mistakes were skimping on quality control, which led to the infamous "click of death" scandal that killed the Zip disk's reputation; and trying to build on the early success of Zip by rolling out multiple new products in a rush like the Jaz and Clik drives, none of which were the slightest bit compatible with any of the others (including Zip).

It probably didn't help matters that Iomega also became an early case study in how the entry of individual investors in the market could have disorienting effects, as Iomega stock became extremely hot in online communities focused on the then-quite-new individual-investor market, particularly The Motley Fool (see https://www.deseretnews.com/article/491232/FOOLS-RUSH-IN-SEN...). The Fool's founders tapped Iomega as one of their highly recommended "Rule Breakers," and there were people on the Motley Fool message boards who were so convinced that Iomega was The Next Big Thing that they called themselves "Iomegans" (!), preaching the Gospel of Iomega with quasi-religious fervor. All that hype drove the price of Iomega stock to dizzying, unsustainable heights.

All of which makes me wonder in retrospect how connected the bad management decisions and the stock pumping were; it's not hard to imagine managers, confronted by staff with big internal problems, pointing at the stock and saying "if we're doing so badly, why does it keep going up?"

(The Fools sort of apologized for their role in all that in a book they published in 2000, after the Iomega bubble had popped; see https://books.google.com/books?id=3TDjULa4nO4C&lpg=PA148&ots.... But it couldn't have comforted their readers much to learn in that same passage that they had cashed out half their position in Iomega in 1997, earning a 650 percent return.)

Sounds like /r/wallstreetbets had a predecessor!

The 'click of death' thing happened with their later drives; I assume they tried to cut corners either on the design or QA and things suffered as a result. The original SCSI drives didn't have that issue, that I ever saw. It was the later USB and parallel-port drives that weren't especially reliable.

My feeling is that Iomega couldn't figure out if they wanted to do a razors-and-blades business model by selling the drives cheap and then charging for the media, or if they wanted to let the price of media fall, so that it became a widespread standard that they would 'own'. At first they didn't allow anyone else to make Zip disks; eventually they let Fuji and a few others manufacture them and sell them under their own brands. (I still have a few NIB Fuji Zip disks!)

"Money"

Years ago I longed for an LS-120 but by the time I had the money a CD writer was the better deal. I occasionally look at eBay for LS-120s just for fun but I now have a new unicorn to search for and one that didn't even come out in the US - the LS-240. Thank you for a new bit of nostalgia!

So with the LS-120, you could have a Phenom II with the same 3.5/5.25 dual-floppy capability as your old 386SX.

Bought like four of them in external cases from my university's sale-of-scrap-goods dealer. They're just IDE units with a little adapter board to either USB or some weird propriatery connector.

I had a Panasonic (?) digital camera that had a Superdisc drive inside. Pictures you took would be written to whatever disc you had inside (a regular 1.44mb would fill quickly). There was an adapter so you could use the camera itself as an external drive.

I still use some pictures from that camera in ebay listings, 15 years later.