08-30-2012, 02:51 AM
The only thing that would make me nervous about investing in flash drives is that it seems like the technology is moving fast. 15 years ago it was optical media and tape drives in data centers. They got wiped out as hard drives got cheaper and larger. Now hard drives may be getting wiped out by solid state. Maybe there's really nowhere to go from here, or maybe in 10 years solid state will be dead and we'll be storing our data in portable wormholes or whatever the next technology is.
Investing in tech always feels a little risky to me. Your best bet is the hot new startup with the awesome technology with the hope it doesn't end up causing cancer or getting replaced by something else next spring. (Whereas IBM is not really a tech company so much as a service company and Microsoft isn't really a tech company so much as a patent holder, so I hear. Samsung is a tech company, I guess, but they're so diversified. "We make flash technology" is narrow enough to be worrisome.)
Investing in tech always feels a little risky to me. Your best bet is the hot new startup with the awesome technology with the hope it doesn't end up causing cancer or getting replaced by something else next spring. (Whereas IBM is not really a tech company so much as a service company and Microsoft isn't really a tech company so much as a patent holder, so I hear. Samsung is a tech company, I guess, but they're so diversified. "We make flash technology" is narrow enough to be worrisome.)