"I think digital entertainment is going to be explosive growth for the consumption of hard disk drives over the course of the next several years. So I think this is a huge opportunity for the industry. Today, we have 38 customers in the digital entertainment space. And we shipped almost 1.3 million units primarily into that space last quarter."
And as consumers catch on to the technology now... Maxtor and its rivals are looking at the potential for selling more higher capacity drives as high definition digital recorders arrive on the market. Tufano tells us Maxtor is now looking at selling hard drives for notebook computers... an opportunity some might say it has missed so far...
"I don't think we missed it. Our focus was on enterprise drives and our core businesses and desktop PCs and our focus on near line and mid line storage for enterprise applications for digital entertainment and for external storage. I think that positions us to engage in the notebook PC market which quite frankly has only shown growth of an explosive nature over the last six quarters."
Some computer makers, like Apple, are expecting sales of notebook computers to equal those of desktops in the near future. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.