Brian's Brain

Back in 2004, both Matt Miller and I weighed in, with no shortage of skepticism, on Sandisk's just-announced Shoot & Store campaign. The company's belief, in brief, was that if it was able to hit certain consumer-friendly retail price points with its flash memory cards, folks wouldn't bother dumping the cards' contents (once full) onto hard drives, optical discs or other alternative media for archive. Instead, they'd just toss the full card into a shoebox, or a desk drawer, go out and buy another Shoot & Store card, and proceed to fill it up.

A great way for a flash supplier to goose demand and fill flash memory fabs. Not a great way, however, to solve a consumer problem, I suggested then and I still suggest. Why does Sandisk believe it can successfully swim upstream against an increasingly strong current of hardware, software and systems momentum (spanning computers, cameras and the code that allows them to communicate) that assumes a user will dump his pictures off the pricey semiconductor memory in the camera and onto a common, incredibly inexpensive magnetic media repository? I don't know about you, but my desk drawer contains a miniscule black hole (akin to the one in the clothes dryer that eats socks); I'd never trust my precious photos to it. Not to mention the mind-boggling difficulty of figuring out which of the three dozen memory cards in the palm of my hand contains the particular picture of Aunt Polly (or my precious puppy) that I'm looking for.

The next step in Sandisk's fab-filling mission occurred in January of last year, when it purchased Matrix Semiconductor, a 3-D OTP (one-time programmable) memory manufacturer whose technology I wrote about in a feature article one year earlier. At the time Sandisk announced the acquisition, I remember thinking (but I don't think I publicly shared those thoughts) that this was the perfect memory for Shoot & Store. After all, to that point, Sandisk had been selling over-featured (ie re-writeable) NAND flash memory into the write-once application. And yesterday, as Digital Photography Review reports, Sandisk made my prognostication official.

Sorry, but I still don't buy into the usage model that Sandisk's pitching. What about you, folks? I'm having breakfast with Sandisk at PMA next week and, if they succeed in changing my mind (even a little bit), I'll report back. Until then, I welcome your thoughts.