A source close to Japanese HDD company Fujitsu said today that there are likely to be only three players in the market by 2001. That could indicate Fujitsu is once more planning one of its big swoops. Fujitsu will be one of them, he claimed. He said that recent figures from Maxtor, Seagate, Quantum and Western Digital (WD) indicated that the writing is on the wall for smaller HDD players. But Fujitsu, our source maintained, was a long term player in the market. Our feel is that Fujitsu will be a long term player but we must never forget IBM. Nor must we forget Amdahl. We can probably forget Conner and other players, our Fujitsu source indicated. But not their intellectual properties, maintained by some players, still. He said one gig of hard drive space cost a mere dollar. So why are the rest of us paying so much? ®