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perspective - comparing the SSD market today
to earlier tech disruptions
by Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - January 3, 2012 |
It probably won't
surprise you to learn that the subject of SSDs came up a lot with the friends
and relatives I talked to during the recent Christmas holiday.
How do
I explain the significance of the SSD market to people with diverse backgrounds
in a couple of sentences?
That's quite a challenge.
The
easiest people to discuss the SSD market with are those with a background in
electronics - particularly if they have worked in semiconductor companies.
There
are also many common frames of reference when I talk to people who have
worked in the computer market.
Despite that, however, the
semiconductor related issues (such as risks of potential bottlenecks in
product roadmaps and reliability subtleties and cost factors associated with
different types
of flash memory) are concepts which are beyond the comprehension of most
computer people - even if they understand how processors work. CPU designers
have stuck to the safe side of the chip technology rules street in recent
decades - whereas SSD designers have been crashing around and beyond the
safety barriers of accepted memory process design rules.
Even those
who are very computer literate just have to accept that there are important
strands in chip technology which they can't understand from first principles -
and they therefore have to rely on indirect clues and hope that the reference
sources they trust are correct when it comes to making supplier choices.
Since
the flurry of acquisition and IPO fever in the SSD market in
2011 - it's
become much easier discussing the significance of the SSD market with people
whose backgrounds are financial - like accountants and business managers with
MBAs. That's because money talks. And the SSD financials tell a clear story.
Here is a market which was till recently too small to bother learning about.
But it now such good prospects for revenue growth (100% / year in some
segments) and potential
towering revenue ceilings. These factors mean that a handful of leading
SSD companies were valued in 2011 at a total amount worth more than the
combined revenue of the entire market of several hundred SSD companies. SSDs
could be a new tech growth bubble.
The toughest people for me to
explain the context of the SSD market to - are those who have no technology
background at all - even if they have achieved senior positions in people
related markets - like law and psychology.
In those circumstances I
know that not a word I say about architecture, chip technology or market size
is going to be understood. But I can still find reference points from everyday
life. And my argument goes something like this.
Since the early 1970s
there have been 3 revolutionary disruptive influences in the electronics and
computing markets.
- the commercialization of the internet
- the transition of digital storage to solid state drives (SSDs)
I
can relate where I think we are in the SSD market at the start of 2012 to
distinct phases in those earlier revolutionary markets.
Comparison
with the microprocessor market.
The first microprocessors started
shipping in the early 1970s. By 1980 - it was clear that the micro was going to
affect a lot more than just the computer peripherals market. By that time micros
were being designed for wide deployment in factory automation and process
control systems and the new digital technologies enabled improvements in the
levels of efficiency and repeatable quality in the manufacture of everything
from foodstuffs and chemicals to cars - which had previously been impossible.
All this was still before the introduction of the Wintel PC - which as a
standard reference platform later enabled the creation of entirely new markets.
I would say that the SSD market today (despite its long
history)
is similar to the state of the microprocessor market in 1980. Some of the SSD
types and applications for SSDs are already in use - but we still haven't got to
the equivalent of the 16/32 bit micro market - because there are many
architectural improvements and reference platforms still to be developed.
Comparison
with the internet market.
The internet moved into a new higher
orbit with the introduction of commercial web sites in 1995. Before then the
primary use of the internet had been email - but as we now know - the web
eventually made it easier to find out information about almost anything and
then buy it in almost seamless real-time transactions.
I would
equate the state of the SSD market today with the state of the web in about 1998
- when you could already see a lot of the promise and the direction that the
web was going towards (the hype was so great we had the dotcom bubble) but this
was still before Google became operational and long before the economics of
digital rights management - and iTunes and the Kindle.
In the SSD
market today we can extrapolate from current business uses of SSDs and speculate
about future SSD enabled markets. But we still haven't got the pure play SSD
enabled information economies in play yet. Most of what we've got today with
Facebook, YouTube and online games is SSD accelerated versions of businesses
that already existed before.
How long before we get to the Kindle age
in the SSD market?
I expect we'll see entirely new SSD enabled markets
in the next few years - but it could be 2015 or later before it starts to be
clear who the SSD equivalents of the Wintel platform (leveraging the
microprocessor) or Amazon and Apple (leveraging the web) will be.
If
you're the CEO in a new startup and you think that your SSD enabled services
will change the world - send me an email when you're ready for our readers to
know more. | |
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| 3 things that could have
killed flash SSDs |
The
emerging size of
the flash SSD market as you see it today was by no means inevitable. It owes a
lot to 3 competing storage media competitors which failed to evolve fast enough
in the Darwinian jungle of the storage market in the
past decade.
One of these 3 contenders is definitely on the road to extinction -
but could one of the other 2 still emerge to threaten flash SSDs?
The
article -
SSD's past phantom
demons explores the latent market threats which hovered around the flash SSD
market in the past decade. They seemed real and solid enough at the time. |
 |
Getting a realistic
perspective of flash SSD's past demons (which seemed very threatening at the
time) may help you better judge the so-called "new" generation of nv
memory contenders - which are also discussed in the article. ...read the article | | | |
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| don't all PCIe SSDs
look pretty much the same? |
When you look at the
photos and headline specs for high speed PCIe SSDs - it's easy to come away with
the impression that they all look the same and have about the same performance.
After
all - how different can they be?
But don't let the experience of the
2.5" SSD market -
in which clusters of consumer SSD vendors use the
same or similar
controllers and hover
close together inpopular
(consumer) performance rankings - give you the wrong idea about
PCIe SSDs.
In
this market the performance limits and capabilities of the SSD aren't set by an
old hard disk interface
and package limitations.
In the PCIe market the products you get are
limited only by the imagination of the designers - tempered by the guesses of
marketers who are trying to predict the optimum (most salable) features for an
ideal SSD. |
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