So the current plan's to come up with a 800GB capacity, CD-sized media costing $180 a pop and which needs a $18k drive to be usable at all?

Even if this comes out on schedule, what are the odds there'll be a 1TB 2.5" eSATA external hard drive available well before then, and costing less?

More fragile, certainly, and maybe taking up a bit more volume, but proven technology not needing an expensive bespoke reader to be maintained to keep your backups accessible.

Optical disks tend to suck, anyway: you typically get half way through burning one using the stupid "it's like a vinyl record, make sure the needle doesn't skip" interface cooked up by Philips and pals back in the day, and then something craps out and leaves you with a shiny coaster. Or you can buy the more expensive rewritable disks, rip up the standards books, drag the hardware into the 21st century, and pretend that they're like very slow hard drives, hoping that all this doesn't make it all crap out, too.

I mean, one that's highly reliable and readable on muttilple types of devices like CD and DVD and not so blinking expensive as blupay and plugs into any usb or ethernet and on and on

Paris, 'cos she needs one for her home movies

Nerds will use the drives to place bits on the writiable surface to tmake 3D art.

Alternative drives will come out of this like why have the media spinning at all and just have a mirror to do all the spinning and data sorting thus increasing the lifespan of the media.