The The late 90s were an exciting time for technology enthusiastswith new and experimental gadgets constantly appearing. Looking back now, it’s easy to remember the early portable storage media diskettesCDs and flash drives. But that’s because devices are winning the war, at least for a while. Many other storage technologies helped make the industry what it is today, but many of them were so short-lived that it’s easy to overlook their impact.
Iomega’s Clik! The driver fits into this category. If you’ve been following storage media around the turn of the millennium, you might remember this. But if you don’t, it’s because Clik never took off and its vitality evaporated shortly after its debut. Around this time, Iomega had already made a name for itself with the popularity of the Zip drive released a few years earlier. Although Zip drives had a larger capacity, they were too bulky for laptops or cameras, and Iomega was looking for a way to break into the nascent portable device market.
Flash memory cards such as CompactFlash and SmartMedia existed, but their cost put them out of reach for many consumers in 1999. A 40MB flash card can set you back $120 to $160, Clik! the disk held the same 40MB for about $10. The drive could fit into the PCMCIA (PC Card) slot and fit snugly on the side of a laptop, which was a big deal in 1999. It’s strange to think of using a spinning disk for camera storage, but Iomega’s proposition was that users could upload images stored on their cameras to the Clik! Disc during shooting. A great idea on paper, but a misnomer and bad timing quickly led to its demise.
Iomega chose a disastrously bad name
The case popularized the word “click” in the tech world
Iomega really couldn’t have picked a worse name for their product. A year before the Clik premiered, Iomega faced a class action lawsuit over the widespread “clicks of death” failures of its Zip drives. It’s true that the phrase “click of death” originated here before it was applied to failed IDE hard drives. It is a terrible sound that is etched in the memory of everyone who has ever been there traditional spinning platter hard disk More than 10 years (sometimes less). It has an A sound Click on Zip drive on Wikipediacan trigger latent PTSD for anyone who’s owned old storage media long enough to hear a failure.
As you can imagine, the novel “Clik!” Not a good way to sell discs, given the popularization of the term “clicking of death”. It soon became synonymous with any defective drive and the dreaded sound of its impending failure. Iomega rebranded the product as “PocketZip” the following year. Believe it or not, the naming mishap played a relatively minor role in its lack of success, though it certainly gave potential buyers an extra reason not to buy it.
The real reason Clik! failed spectacularly
No one wanted to receive him with a flash on the rise
Iomega’s previous success with Zip drives is easy to understand. It filled a real gap in the storage market. The drives looked and worked like floppy disks, but offered 100MB of memory instead of 1.44MB. The industry quickly embraced the technology because it was a no-brainer. Unfortunately for Iomega, they weren’t able to replicate the same success with the Clik, especially since flash memory prices were already falling rapidly.
Click! the drives had moving parts and could not compete in such a market switch to solid state storage. The cheaper price point kept the product afloat for a few years, but the format never caught on and Iomega killed it off completely by 2002.
Iomega tried to get camera and MP3 player manufacturers to adopt the technology, but they didn’t bite. Everyone could see where the storage market was going, and it wasn’t true of another volume format with moving parts. Iomega has introduced to Agfa the Agfa ePhoto CL30 camera model that uses the Clik format! It was one of the only commercial products to feature Clik, along with Iomega’s own MP3 player, HipZip. They came and went as quickly as the format itself. It was the beginning of the end for Iomega, which was acquired by EMC in 2008 and became irrelevant shortly after.
Click! was a solution to a non-existent problem
None of Iomega’s products have ever matched the success of its Zip drive. Iomega needed the camera industry to partner with its Clik! Drive in the same way as the Zip drive of the PC industry a few years ago. The manufacturer mistakenly believed that it could go toe-to-toe with flash cards, but flash won by a landslide and remains the dominant storage medium used in SSDs, USB drives, SD cards, smartphones and other devices to this day.
I don’t think Clik! it was a bad product. It came with a cost advantage at the time, and it was smart to implement. I attribute its downfall to Iomega trying to solve a problem that was already being solved. Click! arrived, making it easy to anticipate Clik’s inevitable obsolescence from the start.
