From Reuters, Hard disk pioneers won Physics nobel: France’s Albert Fert and Germany’s Peter Gruenberg won the 2007 Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for a breakthrough in nanotechnology that lets huge amounts of data be squeezed into ever-smaller spaces.
My take: Hard disk has changed the way we live and work, as we can find it in MP3 players or computers. But hard disk makers are not good investments in general. One can look at Seagate (STX), Western Digital (WDC) long term chart (5, 10 years) to see its so so performance. I think this industry is just too competititive and chronic price cuts makes the profit too thin.
Good technology does not necessarily translate into (very) profitable business. I think Google is a rare specie in the tech arena, with its unique business model and almost monopoly postion in the market, and the ever lower cost of hard drives to store its data 🙂
