Slashdot Mirror
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?
and yamaha knows they arent in a position to compete with the likes of Lite-on, Msi, LG, etc. Face it, the CD-RW has reached the end point as far as innovation goes. A modern Lite-on burner can record to even the shittiest media, handles most forms of copy protection without grief, can be purchased for under $60, and never coasters a disk.
The next big frontier is Dvd recorderables, which is still a mess. And i am sure thats what yamaha is looking at for potential profits.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
There is no money in it. Other companies like Fujitsu also pulled out of part of the industry - IE. IDE hard drives.
If you look at the HP line of laser printers I think you'll see they cheapened and cheapened them from the Laserjet III to the present models.
Then look at your consumer PC's and we see the same thing... cheaper and cheaper - but a few years ago they had 5 or more PCI slots - now we see 3 slots - but in a mini tower. haha.
Power supplies also are compromised.
How about warrenties on hard drives? The drives we bought 10 years ago would run for 150,000 hours MTBF = 17 years. I have hard drives that have been in use for 17 years. Seriously! I got a pair of maxtor 350 MB ESDI drives that started out in a VAX. They are still running.
Does anyone think that the drive they buy next year with a 1 year warrenty is going to still be functioning past 2015?
How about 2010?
If people want cheap I guess they get cheap. If they want quality I don't know where they need to go. Personally I'd rather pay more and get better quality.