The company pivoted to other storage solutions, like selling rebranded optical disc drives, external hard drives, and network-attached storage devices. However, none of these products were particularly unique or competitive, as Iomega went from dominating a specific niche to fighting in a market segment where it had no particular competitive advantage

An interesting lesson to try to apply to current business (not to mention career skills).

I remember cataloging and transferring a bunch of a laboratory's "Bernoulli" cartridges to Zip because they worried that they wouldn't be able to replace the Bernoulli drive if/when it failed. Then to CD, because it was incomprehensible that optical drives would go the way of the floppy. Probably a decade of data, and I think it fit on like 20 CDROMs.

For a while, I thought it was ok to just keep everything on multiple hard drives, but now it would take a special effort to get data off those IDE HDDs. And SSDs decay if not powered. It's hard to keep electronic data for 100 years.

I still remember all the data I lost when the drive embedded its entire head assembly into the disk I was using. Fuck Iomega.

Despite the fact that click death was avoidable with a simple bracket OR an updated driver AND only affected their very first product, I won’t really miss them.

If Jazz drives had been their first product and at a reasonable price point, things probably would’ve gone differently for them.

I'm still running a 2010 Iomega NAS. Swapped the Lenovo OS that they updated it to to plain Debian, because the "upgrade" from Iomega OS to the version they released under Lenovo had ads in the admin menus.

IMO the Zip disks, Jaz disks, and MiniDiscs were the last really satisfying physical media formats (UMD was also really cool, but somehow even more niche given it was PSP-specific).

There was something about them that just made you feel like a secret agent using them. Like a prop out of a James Bond movie where the villain keeps their plans.

CDs and DVDs had nothing on them.

One of the designers I worked with my first year at the college paper went on to design the packaging for Zip and Jaz drives. It paid well enough that he was able to afford to buy a condo in San Diego in his early 20s.

I miss my Zip drives.

I have a zip drive in a closet with a zip disk with most of my class work from college.