Another case study for you - the HDD turns 50

Want to see a product life cycle? Look at the humble hard disk drive. Invented 50 years ago by IBM, it has steadily dropped in size and price. A few years ago IBM sensed that the margin was gone and it sold out of the business. Nevertheless the market remains big with niches developing all the time. However it's hard to make money except by low-cost production and high volumes. HDDs also face competition from solid-state memory devices. Although HDDs are attractive in terms of price, performance and size, technologies such as Flash memory are robust, immune to the likely effects of shock and power loss and getting bigger, faster and cheaper by the day. Can you see a future for HDDs, or will they be overwhelmed by new technology? Sounds like a good essay subject to me.