When Bad PR Happens To Good Products.

MARK: I'm still laughing over a news release I got this week: Highground Systems took what has to be the lowest approach to getting my attention in a long time. Their news was headlined: "Is It Safe? Protecting Yourself front the Y2K Storage Crisis." Which would have been okay, except that they paper-clipped a condom to the top of the page.

HAL: I got one of those too!

MARK: I guess they thought a condom would make me think of safety.

HAL: It made me think of sex.

MARK: It sure didn't make me think about Y2K. And besides, I still don't believe there's going to be any kind of "crisis" in the storage industry six months front now, no matter what Highground thinks.

HAL: I'm with you. If there's a "Y2K" problem, it's in the hype and in the fears that that hype is generating. I've heard about people stocking up on water and canned goods. But are they burning CD-Rs or other write-once optical disks to preserve their data? I don't think so.

MARK: If there's a bright side to the Y2K hype, though, it's encouraging people to think about backup and restore issues--which are going to be around long after the New Year's Eve champagne goes flat,

HAL: My gut feeling about Y2K is that, while there are sortie old Cobol programs that can't handle three-digit year dates, anybody who's responsible for maintaining those programs is already developing a work-around Any programmer who wants to stay employed after January 2 is right now making sure that nothing bad happens on January 1.

MARK: But you have' to agree, don't you, that the hundreds of millions of embedded processors out there could have problems when the dates roll over.

HAL: I guess I'll just have to reset the clock in my coffee maker and the timer in my VCR. Big deal. If some appliance really needs a year setting, you can use 1972. which has the same days and dates as 2000.

MARK: I don't know if it's going to be so trivial, Hal. What about people who are riding in an elevator? What about security-lockout systems? What about automated emergency-response systems? What about fire sprinklers that may turn on when they think a date they don't like must mean fire damage to their sensors? A lot of things we don't think about have chips inside.

HAL: Well, if the people who manufacture and maintain them aren't following up on their own products, they deserve to get sued and go out of business when people find out about their shortcomings.

MARK: Since neither of us is a professional programmer, why don't we change the subject and talk about things that we do know a k)t about. Have you seen the new Ecrix tape drive? Its performance specs are very close to those of DLT, but it's priced in a much lower range--about where 4mm tape is.

HAL: Does it use a new recording technique?

MARK: Not so much a new technique as a new algorithm--a new way or writing the data onto the tape--called

HAL: Is there a library for it?

MARK: Not yet, but I hear they're sending samples around.

HAL: The newest thing I've seen is Iomega's latest version of their 40MB Clik! system. They've shrunk the drive down to fit inside a Type II PC Card slot, which should give them entree to the new, thinner notebook computer market, where removable storage has been practically nil.

MARK: Is Clik! really a rotating magnetic medium, or is there semiconductor flash-memory inside?

HAL: It's a rotating disk, about two inches in diameter. The media lists for $10 apiece and the drive lists for $199. Technologically, it's a nice achievement. But I'm not quite so sanguine about its' ultimate market potential or about its long-term viability, since anything that's that small can be vulnerable to environmental hazards.

MARK: I'm surprised that Iomega stuck with the "Clik!" name after their unfortunate experience with some Zip drives that failed, last year.

HAL: That was only a few hundred drives out of an installed base, in the tens of millions.

MARK: True. But the failure generated a noise that users called the "click of death."

HAL: Clik! was originally called "nHand," but once the change was made and Iomega formally announced it as Clik!, it was probably too late to ,change it into something else.

MARK: I'm glad to hear that it's shipping. Maybe 'now they'll stop snapping those little clicking noisemakers at us on the Comdex show floor.

HAL: So we're back to the subject of dumb attention-getting ideas!

MARK: When I worked at InfoWorld a few years ago, some of the editors got 'a promo package with a live bullet inside. And I found a package on my front step one day that included a' three-foot-tall bomb...

HAL: No!

MARK: Really. It looked like a torpe-do, It was too heavy for the box it came in, so it completely shattered the box and the CD-ROM inside.

HAL: Dare I ask--what was it supposed to promote?

MARK: I don't remember, but it had a World War II theme.

HAL: That's the trouble with things like that: you remember the promo campaign, but not the client, A PR agency sent around invitations to a party at Comdex last year, but the envelope was filled with confetti. Little bits of the stuff got stuck in my sweater and all over the carpet. It took me half an hour to vacuum it all up. Needless to say, I didn't go to the client's party or their booth. Maybe our readers know some more examples of misguided PR. If you do, please e-mail me at [e-mail].

MARK: And if you want to tell us about new storage products that our readers ought to hear about, e-mail me at [e-mail].