BUSINESS USERS FLOCK TO THE INTERNET BUT MAY NEED STORAGE SAFETY NET, 3M
SURVEY REVEALS

ST. PAUL, Minn. (June 20, 1995) - Business computer users are going online
en masse but may be in for a rude awakening when their reach for the
Internet's vast information resources exceeds the grasp of their current
storage platforms.

So concludes a new 3M survey of online usage in small, medium and large
enterprises. The survey found that business users online are now
downloading multimedia and database files at a brisk pace, and that most
expect to greatly increase their reliance on the Internet as an
information resource in the months ahead.

The telephone survey of 300 business computer online users was conducted as
pan of a 600-person poll of businesses and consumers, completed in May for
3M by Fleishman-Hillard Research, St. Louis.

Among the survey highlights:

* Nearly seven in ten business users online now download files of up to
five megabytes on a daily or a weekly basis.

* Sixty-five percent expect the size of the files they download to increase
in the coming months.

* One of every five business users online has at one time exhausted
available hard disk space while attempting to download a file - even with
hard disk capacities that now average 760 megabytes.

* Information gathering, not electronic commerce, has driven the vast
majority of business users to the Internet and the World Wide Web.

* Business users online are much more likely than consumers to access the
Internet instead of a commercial online service; among the commercial
services, business users surveyed prefer CompuServe.

"For business users seeking to become more productive through the Internet,
the good news is that online content is both superb and abundant," said
Doug Olson, business development manager, 3M Data Storage Tape Technology
Division. "The proliferation of multimedia files, databases, application
programs, and even Email is, in a real sense, redefining computing. But in
doing so, the online world is putting tremendous strain on the ability of
existing systems to not only store but also to manage all of this
information."

Business users expressed frustration over a growing lack of sufficient hard
disk space with which to accommodate larger files. Twenty percent have run
out of storage space at least once while attempting to download a file.

For online usage in business, the Internet has become increasingly
essential; fully 93 percent of those sampled now use the Internet, the
majority on a daily basis. Seventy-six percent make use of the Internet's
World Wide Web, while 45 percent also use commercial online services.

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

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