EMC buys Iomega

OK, hands up. Who here owned an Iomega ZIP drive? I did.  In fact I bought several of these drives (over the years I owned 100MB and 250MB ZIP drives and the 1GB Jaz drive - and they all still work) along with a stack of media (still have hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars worth of it about the place), and I still remember a time when I thought that 100MB was a lavish amount of storage that was more than I would ever need. 

Iomega was once one of the original "big tech" stocks of the 90s, trading at over $100 a share.  Unfortunately, what goes up invariably comes down and the company found it increasingly difficult to stay relevant in the face of cheap storage offered by writable CDs, DVDs and then cheap flash storage. 

Now Iomega stock is worth some $3.60, and today storage giant EMC has announced the acquisition of the company for $213 million.  EMC also owns the online storage company Mozy so I'm expecting to see EMC offer a local backup solution to augment the online solution.

Thoughts?