Sandisk Strategy for Shoot & Store Memory Cards

In this BusinessWeek Online interview with Sandisk's CEO, Eli Harari, Sandisk may be opening up a new market for "Shoot & Store" memory cards. This paradigm introduces consumable low-end memory cards which low-capacity, and write images permanently - much akin to a concept of a CD-R.

The concept is to distribute them widely in places where you would normally find film - drugstores, supermarkets, tourist destinations. Mr. Harari "believes it's possible for such inexpensive flash cards to become the equivalent to film... Consumers will use them to keep their images on, he figures, and will buy five or six such cards each year to use for snapping pictures at special occasions." They would then store the cards forever and not erase the images.

Instead of downloading images to the computer, the Sandisk CEO thinks users "would rather have the shoe-box paradigm, where they store their images on flash cards that they can label and put in a shoe box. That's a lot safer than in a computer file or on a disk drive. And it's easy to label... I have over 10,000 pictures in my computer, and I have difficulty finding the ones I want to look at. That's not the case with Shoot & Store."

Personally, I find this concept both attractive and unfavourable at the same time. It would be good to have access to inexpensive cards if you're on vacation and short of storage, but I think a large rewritable memory card would be more economical in the long run. For a start, the concept of digital is to have the freedom to shoot freely, keep the images that you did want, and delete those that you didn't. I think using write-once storage would adversely affect the shooting habits of users, as they would be more cautious in not wasting their shots. Secondly, I like keeping all my photos easily accessible (read: on my computer) - I wouldn't want to start sifting through shoeboxes to find the photo I took while snorkelling on the third day of my vacation in Fiji...