Yamaha To Withdraw From CD-R/RW Business

An anonymous reader writes "What's going on. When I first heard this I thought it was a bad joke. They make great burners! 'Tokyo, February 5, 2003 - Yamaha Corp. decided at a board meeting to cease sales of CD-R/RWs for personal computers and to withdraw completely from the business by the end of March 2003.'" Does any other company make burners that can burn an image on the CD?

Comments

it's all about dvd's baby...

[goofballs]

cd-r/w's are running into the $40 range these days- yamaha doesn't want to / can't compete at those prices, so they'll stick with higher margin dvd burners. makes good business sense.

Well, I work for a small OEM...

[Akardam]

... and it's been my experience that there are cheaper and more reliable alternatives out there now. Samsung in particular is what we use most of the time. They're inexpensive and reliable, and we've had maybe 1 bad unit in 500. I don't remember exact numbers, but we used to have a pretty high DOA or >6mo failure on the Yamaha IDE burners (their SCSI burners were always great, but then again they were expensive, too).

On a broader view, I see that burners are becoming commodized (sp?). Anyone can make a burner these days. Perhaps they'll stay in the semi-cutting edge markets like DVD burning?

Re:beat goes on

[Zathrus]

modems

Except for the majority of the world who can't get any form of high speed access. But cell phones and landlines work just fine for low speed modems.

wired keyboards/mice

Except for the vast number of users who don't like replacing batteries in their keyboard/mouse, don't like the interference problems, and don't like the additional latency.

700~800mb CDs

Ok... I'll agree these are doomed to obscurity, but not for another 5 years or so. Maybe more. The DVD rewriteable market is still busy screwing itself due to a lack of standards. Until one clear standard comes about (or the various standards become irrelevant due to writer and reader interoperability) CD-R/RW is going to keep a huge chunk of the market.

analog displays

Except that CRT tubes still give far better blacks than any digital display, and do better than any current production method for color range, color accuracy, refresh, and half a dozen other things... yeah, I want my HDTV to be DLP/LCD/LCOS/D-ILA, but it has a lot less strenuous requirements than a monitor.

CD-R(W)s are Dead

[MBCook]

Let's face it, there isn't a future in CD-R(W)s. They are no longer the huge storage they used to be, and they cost so little that it's hard to make money on them. We've reached the maximum speed that we can without putting 12 lasers in each drive, etc. which wouldn't be cost effective.

The future in in DVD[-+]R(W)s. This is where they will be able to make money, and I hope that they do enter this arena as they are, IMHO, one of the best (if not the best) makers of drives on the market. I also hope that someone brings something like their disc tatoo tech to DVD drives. While this seems like bad news, it's not all that suprising. Time goes on, new technology overtakes the old. It's digital evolution.

Look at me, I sound like a philosopher. He he he.