Seagate CEO Bill Watkins is not shy of speaking his mind. In one interview he infamously admitted: “Let’s face it, we’re not changing the world. We’re building a product that helps people buy more crap – and watch porn.” In a recent London meeting with the press, one of the most important days in US political history, the boss of the world’s largest hard drive maker was equally forthcoming, introducing himself by saying: “Yes, I did vote for Obama.”
This admission indicates Watkins’ ability to spot a sure bet, but while he led a $12.7bn (£8.6bn) revenue company that is a big fish in the storage pond, at that moment there was little than he could say about the current financial market. “I have no visibility,” he says. “The macro-economic conditions have everybody stalled; firms are like deer in the headlights. Our theme is ‘onward through the fog’.”
Watkins says that the IT industry generally is going through a flat period, but adds that this is nothing new. “What gives us hope is that the world has changed. We went through a time like this back in 2000. Everyone bought a ton of storage to get over the Year 2000 phenomenon, but after that there was a real stall for IT spending that lasted for two to three years.”
While the slowdown in the early part of this decade was mostly concerned with the business-to-business market, now there are new customers for Seagate’s goods, and indeed for all IT firms as consumer and business spending habits blur. “Back then, everybody in the IT world was about selling to the enterprise,” says Watkins.
“Whether it was EMC selling storage, Dell selling PCs to small businesses, Microsoft selling the operating systems or Cisco selling the networks. All apart from Apple: Apple in the Nineties wasn’t very good at selling to business, and no one bought Macs in the business world.”
Now though, these firms have a new market, a market that continues to grow. “Flash forward to today and what we were doing in the enterprise market we are now doing in your home. We are flooding your home with content. It it’s not data in the conventional sense, but it is rich media content, its high-definition television, and video... most of it self-created, and it all requires a lot of storage.
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