Highlighs Emerging 'Space Race' in Storage Technology

USERS LIKE INTERNET WARES, BUT LACK PLACE TO PUT IT ALL, NEW 3M SURVEY OF
ONLINE USAGE REVEALS

ST. PAUL, Minn. (June 20, 1995) - Users surfing the Internet are
increasingly finding gold in cyberspace - in the form of databases,
multimedia files and free software -- but few say their computer systems
can handle the wealth of information there for the downloading, according
to a new survey of online usage from 3M.

Although the jury remains out on use of the Internet for electronic
commerce, business and consumer users alike are embracing the online world
as an increasingly important information resource, the survey indicates.
This in turn is expected to place unprecedented demands on PCs to store
and manage the ongoing explosion in the number and size of files at the
user's disposal.

The telephone survey of 600 online users - 300 each from the business and
home sectors - was conducted for 3M in May by Fleishman-Hillard Research,
an independent public opinion and market research division of
Fleishman-Hillard, Inc., St Louis. Among the survey highlights:

* Consumers are right on the heels of business users in tapping into the
rich and varied content of the Internet and the commercial online
services. Users in business and at home expect their online usage to
increase markedly during the course of the next year.

* Increasingly, users are grabbing multi-megabyte files, and one in five is
experiencing frustration as they discover their current systems lack the
capacity to house these files.

* If they had enough disk space, users would download even more audio and
graphics-intensive files from cyberspace - and they expect to do just that
in the months ahead.

* Users are quickly "hitting the wall" for storage, although the average
hard drive size tops 760 megabytes for business users surveyed and 500
megabytes for consumers.

Storage-Intensive Content Skyrocketing

"With some six million-plus users on the commercial online services and an
estimated 30 million now on the Internet - with 22,000 World Wide Web
servers alone - the richness of the computing experience today is
unparalleled," said Doug Olson, business development manager, 3M Data
Storage Tape Technology Division.

"As the survey reveals, users are pushing aggressively to expand the
workspace to accommodate this interactive new world, where more
storage-intensive content is added literally every hour," Olson said.
"Even with hard disk sizes approaching gigabyte territory, this new 'space
race' promises to be relentless, calling for ever-greater innovation in
storage technology."

More than three-quarters of all the business users polled said they expect
their Internet and online service usage to increase while 61 percent of
the consumers had the same expectation. In addition, 90 percent of all
business-people responding said that they download information, with
two-thirds saying they do so on a daily or a weekly basis.

Among consumers, 35 percent reported that they download files daily or
weekly. An additional 31 percent said that they download files at least
once a month.

Both groups expressed frustration over a lack of storage space with which
to accommodate larger files. In fact, one out of every five users surveyed
said that they had run out of hard disk space when attempting to download
a file.

At the same time, most users said they expect to download larger files a
year from now. Nearly 20 percent of business users and 11 percent of
consumers today are downloading files in the 5-to-10 megabyte range, and
most agreed they would download more files more often if they had adequate
storage space.

"If present trends continue and users download, say, 25 MB to their systems
each month, in a year's time many will have filled their hard disks to
overflowing," 3M's Olson said.

The survey also revealed that the Internet is the dominant destination for
business users, while home users feel more comfortable with the commercial
online services like CompuServe and America Online.

The vast majority of business and consumer users now tend to rely on
computers both at home and at work; 94 percent of online business users
said that they also use a computer at home while 78 percent of the
consumers surveyed reported using PCs at their place of business.

3M is the world's largest supplier of branded removable recording media for
data storage applications.

 ============================================================
 From the  'New Product News'  Electronic News Service on....
 AOL (Keyword = New Products) & Delphi (GO COMPUTING PRODUCT)
 ============================================================
 This information was processed from data provided by the 
 company or author mentioned. For additional details, please 
 contact them directly at the address/phone number indicated.
 All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
 ============================================================
 All submissions for this service should be addressed to:
 BAKER ENTERPRISES,  20 Ferro Dr,  Sewell, NJ  08080  U.S.A.
 Email: RBakerPC (AOL/Delphi), rbakerpc@delphi.com (Internet)
 ============================================================
