EVERYBODY WANTS TO EAT EMC'S LUNCH

摘要

It's a humdrum office park 27 miles west of Boston. But through the '90s, the Hopkinton (Mass.) home of EMC Corp. was the global capital of the soaring data-storage market. EMC'S stock rose from a split-adjusted 7c to $101, making it the top performer in the Stan- dard & Poor's 500-stock index during the '90s. The world was bursting with digital information, and EMC'S massive disk-drive machines, regarded as the best of breed, gave companies around the world a secure place to store every last bit. Naturally, it came at a premium price. One competitor joked that "EMC" stood for Excessive Margin Co. Those margins are shriveling fast, as legions of competitors, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell Computer, and dozens of upstarts, rush into the market. They're not all building the refrigerator-size machines that EMC made famous. These days, even startups and midsize companies want storage, and they're demanding cheaper machines―all of them linked to networks. The key is no longer simply to save the information but to manage and retrieve it faster.