He The late ’90s were an exciting time for technology enthusiasts.with new and experimental gadgets appearing constantly. Looking back, it’s easy to remember the first portable storage media as floppy disksCDs and flash drives. But that’s because those are the devices that won the war, at least for a while. A host of other storage technologies helped shape the industry into what it is today, but many of them were so short-lived that it’s easy to overlook their impact.
Click! Iomega Drive fits perfectly into that category. If you were following emerging storage media around the turn of the millennium, you might remember this. But if it doesn’t, it’s probably because Clik never managed to gain traction and its viability evaporated shortly after its debut. Around this time, Iomega had already made a name for itself with the popularity of its Zip drive that was released a few years earlier. Although Zip drives had greater capacity, they were too bulky for laptops or cameras, and Iomega was looking for a way to enter the nascent portable device market.
Flash memory cards such as CompactFlash and SmartMedia existed, but their price put them out of reach for many consumers in 1999. A 40 MB flash card could cost between $120 and $160, while a Clik! The drive was the same 40MB for about $10. The drive could fit into a PCMCIA (PC Card) slot and sit flush 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 pitch was that users could download the photos stored on their camera to a Clik. Disc while shooting. A good idea on paper, but a naming error and bad timing led to its quick demise.
Iomega chose a disastrously bad name
A Lawsuit Made the Word “Click” Infamous in the Tech World
Iomega really couldn’t have chosen a worse name for its product. A year before the Clik debuted, Iomega was hit with a class-action lawsuit over widespread “click of death” failures in its Zip drives. That’s right, the phrase “click of death” originated here, before being attributed to faulty IDE hard drives. It’s a horrible sound ingrained in the memory of anyone who has ever had a traditional hard drive with rotating platter more than 10 years (sometimes much less). There is a fragment of a clicking Zip drive on Wikipediawhich can trigger latent PTSD in anyone who has owned old storage media long enough to hear one fail.
As you can imagine, naming your new storage medium “Clik!” Amid the popularization of the phrase “click of death” is not a good way to sell units. It quickly became synonymous with any defective record and the terrible sound of its impending failure. Iomega renamed the product “PocketZip” the following year. Believe it or not, the name error only played a comparatively small role in its lack of success, although it certainly gave potential buyers an additional reason to avoid purchasing it.
The real reason Clik! failed spectacularly
No one wanted to adopt it with the flash on the rise
It’s easy to understand Iomega’s past success with its Zip drives. It filled a real gap in the storage market. The drives looked and functioned like floppy disks, but instead of 1.44 MB of storage, they offered 100 MB. The industry quickly adopted the technology because it was a no-brainer. Unfortunately for Iomega, they couldn’t replicate the same success with the Clik, especially since flash storage prices were already falling rapidly.
Click! The units had moving parts and could not compete in a market that was switching to solid state storage. The cheaper price kept the product afloat for a couple of years, but the format never enjoyed widespread adoption and Iomega finally phased it out entirely in 2002. Today, it barely appears in the footnotes of computer storage history.
Iomega tried to get camera and MP3 player manufacturers to implement the technology, but they were not interested. Everyone could see where the storage market was headed and not towards another bulky format with moving parts. Iomega got Agfa to launch a camera model that used this format, the Agfa ePhoto CL30 Clik. This was one of the only commercial products to include Clik, along with Iomega’s MP3 player, the HipZip. They come and go as quickly as the format itself. This marked the beginning of the end for Iomega, which was eventually acquired by EMC in 2008 and lost relevance soon after.
Click! It was a solution to a problem that didn’t exist.
None of Iomega’s products ever mirrored the success of its Zip drive. Iomega needed the camera industry to cooperate with its Clik! drive the same way the PC industry did a few years earlier with the Zip drive. The manufacturer mistakenly believed it could compete head-to-head with flash cards, but flash won overwhelmingly and persists as the dominant storage medium to this day, being used in SSDs, USB drives, SD cards, smartphones, and other devices.
I don’t think Clik! It was a bad product. At the time it was a cost advantage and its implementation was smart. I attribute its downfall to Iomega’s attempt to solve a problem that was already in the process of resolving itself. Flash memory was on an unstoppable trajectory when Clik! arrived, making it easy to predict Clik’s impending obsolescence from the start.
