It's not necessarily an issue of intentionally being anticompetitive. As
a design engineer myself, I know that it is common practice to
intentionally disable support for some hardware configurations or features
simply so that you do not have to test and support so many hardware
configurations.
Verifying that your product works with every seemingly "legal"
configuration with third party products is extremely expensive and never a
sure thing. If a tape drive company were to claim "Our drive works with
every tape that you can fit in the drive" that tape drive will:
1) Be more expensive to cover the cost of future product recalls when you
discover some strange format that your firmware/ASIC doesn't support after
you claimed that it would.
2) Be lower performance as the result of enabling larger guard bands to
cover a wider variation in 3rd party hardware (tapes and formats, in this
example).
I don't design tape drives, so I could be all wet, but the principle is
true in general. I bet that if every computer sold was also sold with a
tape drive, that tape drive vendors would all migrate to one or two
standards making media interchangeable. That kind of volume justifies the
much larger design, verification and support expenses associated with
making a "universal" product.
Bryan
On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, Jim Rankin wrote:
> --- Tim Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> > Ditto Max drives don't even have a FORMAT command in
> > their firmware.
> > Sorry, no dice.
> >
>
> WOW! What a lemon! You just saved me much grief.
> Thanks!
>
> Looks like ALL the newer tape drives on the market are
> rigged against older and/or other manufacturer's tapes
> one way or another, so I guess I'll buy a used, older
> drive at auctions.
>
> Seems to me this might be an arena for a class action
> lawsuit eventually, what with all the rigged,
> anticompetitive models being made!?
>
> Jim
>
>
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