Summit Notebook
Exclusive outtakes from industry leaders
SanDisk’s Eli sings the Blu-Ray blues
The flash memory business may be suffering its worst slump ever, but SanDisk CEO Eli Harari is carving tombstones for other businesses.
The No.1 endangered technology, Harari said at the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Tuesday, is the Blu-Ray DVD. Because the discs don’t work with smartphones, which consumers are increasingly using to watch video, Harari says their days are numbered.
He did not give a time frame for this extinction, though he did note at one point that the average period of time it takes for a new technology to render an existing technology obsolete is five to seven years.
Floppy discs, once a standard component on PCs, have been replaced by flash-based USB drives. And photographic film for cameras has become a fading memory since the advent of digital cameras.
