Iomega completely disrupted the removable bulk storage market held by SyQuest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syquest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syquest), rende

Iomega completely disrupted the removable bulk storage market held by SyQuest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syquest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syquest), rendering their rival virtually irrelevant within a few years. That massive success and complete market domination led to a sense of complacency, and when CD-R and CD-R+W emerged, with 650MB of storage on very inexpensive non-proprietary media, Iomega was slow to react. The first CD-R burners were VCR-sized devices that required a lot of expertise to operate. They cost $15,000 and ran single-speed burning on to media that cost $15-20 a piece. This quickly changed, and within a few years the price of media had plunged below a dollar a unit, and 4x and 8x burners were available for a few hundred bucks. Long after CD-R had displaced Zip disks, Iomega produced a line of mediocre CD-R devices. They didn't succeed, as an internal burner could be purchased for as little as $25 and Iomega's external version was around $300 so as not to cannibalize sales of their flagship Jaz drive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iomega_Jaz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iomega_Jaz), a product that ultimately went nowhere and had near zero adoption. The other thing that hit at about the same time was the internet. With only dial-up speeds people were forced to use removable media to transfer large files, and Iomega offered a cost-effective solution for that problem at the time. As soon as speeds increased and people could send large amounts of data without having to "sneaker-net" it over, the need for these things was largely eliminated.