Seagate CEO Luczo on Drives, Zettabytes, Flash and His Tattoo

To read this interview on Forbes, click on:
Seagate CEO Luczo On Drives, Zettabytes, Flash And His Tattoo
Right at the end of March, I sat down in the cafeteria at Seagate headquarters in Cupertino, California with CEO Steve Luczo to talk about the state of the disk drive industry. There was a lot to discuss: the aftermath of last year’s highly disruptive floods in Thailand, the consolidation of the industry to just a few players, the stock market’s consistent disinterest in disk-drive company stocks, the opportunity for Seagate in the cloud, the role flash memory will play in data storage going forward and the fact that he has a tattoo on his ring finger and a red string around his wrist. Luczo has become the drive industry’s most outspoken leader. He makes no bones about his disdain for the investment community’s lack of respect for disk-drive industry shares; he thinks anyone worrying about the threat from flash storage is deluded; and he sees vast opportunity ahead and annual consumption soars into the zettabytes. Here’s an edited version of the interview.