Sea{Maxtor}gate, OMG!

"Reuters reports that Seagate Technology would buy rival computer disk-drive maker Maxtor Corp. for $1.9 billion. Seagate is already world's largest hard drive manufacturer and Maxtor is the third largest after Seagate and Western Digital."

OMG! This is by far the most shocking news I heard in a long long time, even the HP-Compaq merger wasnt that much of a shock.

The harware industry is turning out to be nothing but duoploy. Almost every major aspect of hardware has turned into a duopoly, Intel & AMD (proccies), nVidia & ATi (GFX), Samsung & Hynix (Memory chips) HP-Compaq & Dell (Desktops).

Now it's down to Seagate and Western Digital as far as quality Hard Drives go. It seems to me that just about every OEM you can buy ships with a cheap Maxtor HD. Will Seagate continue the Maxtor line, or will they dump them and continue to make quality hard drives in place of Maxtor? I think the wost case senerio would have Seagate slapping Seagate stickers on top of Maxtor-quality Hard Drives. Yikes, that would be bad for Seagate's image IMO.

The reason? Maybe it has something to do with intellectual property. Maxtor has been around for ages now, and they have a good number of patents on their name, which may be useful for Seagate. Being a competitor it would have been costly for Seagate to liscence tech from Maxtor, with Maxtor as a separate company, in which case buying Maxtor is the best option for them and gain the extra workforce instantly rather than doing it all over again.

Effects? No idea! How it effects other HDD manufacturers? again no idea! (Other manufacturers include Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi, which bought IBM's drvies division couple of years ago and Fujitsu). Lets just wait and see :D.