the Zip was great during its heydays when its only competitor was the Panasonic SuperDisk that came too late. Even though the SuperDrive has a great potential as a drop-in replacement for existing floppy drives because it was bootable and back-ward compatible to old floppies, its 3 year lag was its fatal misfortune.
Nevertheless, both of these products died quickly when inexpensive CD-R/RW became more available.

Following Cisco’s foodstep on acquiring Linksys to get into the consumer market, I guess EMC can use iomega in the same way. Hopefully EMC would be more agressive on leveraging its newly acquired consumer brand than its networking counterpart.
As new computers come with more and more HDD space, and lots of households have more than a couple desktops, where most of the systems did not come in any kinds of protected data, nor usable backup solutions ( try backing up 200G HDD using DVD-R’s ….), EMC/iomega has a potentially HUGE market if it plays the cards right.

(Iomega’s existing portfolio such as REV and external HDDs should be canned, since blueray-R/RW will soon take their place, just like the way CD-R/RW swallowed the market share for Zip and Jaz)

What EMC/iomega really needs to do, is to deliver an expandable Windows Home Server(WHS) alternative that does not eat the precious data for lunch.

A modular, stackable NAS system with 2 drive bays that comes with 2 drives, pre-configured as RAID1 for data protection. This system can run some types of embedded Linux/FreeBSD with all sorts of media servers running.

Once the space runs out in the main unit, an expansion unit wit 2 pre-populated drives can be added by stacking it with the main unit. Upon seeing the new drives, the main unit concatenates the additional raid-1 volume to the existing one, therefore doubling the size of the storage capacity, while still providing data protection.  (Think adding PVs into a VG on Linux)

Meanwhile, the embedded OS would run some sorts of backup server software, say – retrospect ?
and lets backup client store backups to it.

Now the final touch: Leveraging SaaS by using embedded Mozy client, coupled with the $4.95 monthly unlimited plan they have, you have a consumer friendly data protection solution that also provides remote data bunkering.

Will EMC/iomega make this ? I don’t think so, but I sure hope so.