A Hard-Driving CEO
Watkins made a breakthrough when Seagate bought Conner in 1996 and then mishandled the merger. Faced with four factories making seven different kinds of 3
In 2000, to further Seagate team spirit, Watkins, an avid adventure racer, got the company to launch "Eco Seagate." Each year 200 different Seagate staffers gather in the wilds of New Zealand for a week of outdoors training culminating in a daylong rock climbing, mountain biking, and kayaking endurance race.
Watkins, who became CEO in 2004, showed his competitive edge in buying Maxtor. He promised Seagate employees they'd keep their jobs, shut down unnecessary Maxtor factories, and laid off half of the Maxtor workers. "You've got to be brutal about competition," he says. "It is our job to make them lay off their people and not to lay off our people."
But Seagate unwittingly set off a price war, as Hitachi and others saw a chance to grab market share. By September, they had taken almost half of Maxtor's sales away from Seagate. Watkins hopes that his new strategy of absorbing whatever pricing pain is necessary to keep the customers he still has will lead to a truce.
Storage war. He also had to come up with something to compete with the tiny flash-memory chips that are increasingly replacing disk drives in iPods, laptops, and other mobile devices. Seagate plans to launch a 1.8-inch drive that will fit into smaller MP3 players and store 60 gigabytes-more than enough to store every single episode of Lost and The Office, plus hundreds of songs and pictures. And next year it will offer consumers a supplemental disk drive that will hold a massive 1 terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) for their home systems.
Even if chips win the small-device battle, Watkins expects to win the storage war. People need to download their songs and movies from somewhere, and Seagate dominates the market for big electronic storage, he notes.
Analysts warn that any tech company that relies on a single product is doomed to obsolescence at some point. But they say that Seagate has got years, if not decades, before its hard drives turn into the 21st-century version of buggy whips. And, they say, if anybody can keep Seagate jumping ahead to the next new thing, it's Watkins. "He's a breath of fresh air" in tech, says John Monroe of Gartner Dataquest. "He's gruff and rough around the edges, but he's a brilliant man passionately consumed with making Seagate the best company in the world."
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