Thread regarding Seagate Technology Inc. layoffs

The answer to Seagate problems is to get their head out of the sand - and invest in the right areas for the future. Investing in SSD again for the 8th time would be crazy, systems business has been stillborn most of the time, RISCV could be good - but the sales/pm team doesn’t know RISC from pot.

There is activism needed in this company to get it out of the rut. Filling the top ranks with people other than HDD/Storage nostalgia might be a start.

Luczo bailed on the Chairmanship, will Canon do something. Mosley and the other HDD veterans in Leadership really need a kick.

My perspective is there's only a small set of R&D people who are really at liberty to officially innovate and percolate ideas for new product types and take them through initial product design planning stage. Once product designs and slides are presented, they all seem to be squashed and not funded. It's as if we are just producing the slides/designs themselves as the end goal to show we can do "innovation", but nothing gets advanced that's not HDD related. Beyond that there's the standard incremental functional HDD group improvements and feature development that is allowed. There's no other solicitation, incentive, or encouragement I know of for regular employees not specifically chosen in R&D to promote ideas. It's much more likely you will be labeled a troublemaker for promoting an agenda or idea not aligned to your official management sanctioned goals.

There’s no incentive to innovate at Seagate. If you have a brilliant idea and it works out, to what benefit is it for the employee? A one time bonus, maybe a raise?

The barrier to a lot of technology is so low and investment money is there that I was once told by some older folks that they would be disappointed in me if I gave the idea to seagate rather than try to strike it out on my own. As you mentioned those two guys making snowflake, it only takes two. That could easily have been two seagate engineers that talked about that type of thing over lunch.

Just to be clear, I’m not condoning using seagate resources since that’s a clear violation of the employment agreement. But employees are bound to see gaps in product portfolios or possible new revenue streams that they legally could pursue on their own time and equipment.

I got cut two years ago. HAMR still isn't in volume production yet? Jeebus. That's where the R&D has been going. I hope y'all make it work.

You said the right comment, snowflake, two guys.
Seagate cannot make this kind of decisions. Too many people up top are fighting to survive and instead of giving us a good direction, they just react.
This company is way too fat to work that way.

Seagate is strangled by their incessant need to maintain the dividend. There cannot be any investing with this strategy.

The only growth at Seagate has been the executive's waistlines.

It comes down to leadership, imagination, and strategy. Look at Snowflake. A cloud data platform built from scratch in few years by just 2 guys which now has 600 million in revenue and a market cap of 109 billion. Compare to Seagate's market cap of 16 billion. Seagate was in so much better position to launch something like this but they didn't. There was nothing stopping Seagate from launching something like this and capturing all that value. They even had an in house supply of drives, a systems hardware division, and and army of engineers. It would be smart to do so even now, but if Seagate does it I don't think it will be successful. There's not enough passion, top talent, and commit to a growth culture. Instead, we have a cost cutting culture and narrow focus on developing costly technologies for incremental capacity gains for the same product. Keep in mind that billions with a B in capital has been spent on HAMR. What other uses for that with better ROI?

Seagate doesn't have a future beyond HDD. As you stated, there executive suite has demonstrated zero talent for buying into anything that might extend the brand. No matter what side you come down on regarding HAMR, entire future of the company rests on it. Best of luck to all.