IBM Corp still doesn’t seem to have learned that if it introduces a major new product with a here it is, see what you can do with it attitude, then the product will fail to achieve its potential and likely fail. The classic example was the Series/1 minicomputer, but the Personal Typing System, which could already have been a wow if IBM had packaged it up as a really cheap, ready-to-go dedicated mass market product. The latest example is something called the IBM MediaStreamer system for multimedia storage and delivery. It is actually simply an array of disks configured for video on demand, but the name makes it sound like a tape drive, and you have to read the material three times to work out that it is IBM’s answer to Micropolis Corp’s AudioVisual or AV Server. IBM has been showing a prototype of the MediaStreamer, which is designed to deliver multiple video streams from a single copy stored on a disk array.
