Introduction

OCZ Technology's company headquarters is about an hour away from Candlestick Park, home of the San Francisco 49ers. It's safe to say that a few of the OCZ employees are 49er fans and every 49er fan remembers what happened at the end of 1992.

A controversy was brewing in San Francisco during the 1992 season. The 49ers had a real situation on their hand, two of the greatest quarterbacks of all time. After an injury took him out for most of the season, Joe Montana returned to his starting role on the team. The greatest of all time was aging, but was still in winning form. On the sidelines was a much younger Steve Young who had proved himself on the field in Montana's absence. What a position to be in, right? Well, at the end of the 1992 season, the 49ers and Montana agreed to part ways. Joe left to join the Kansas City Chiefs and Steve Young stayed in San Francisco to go on to win the Super Bowl in 1994.

I find OCZ's current situation similar to the early 1990's 49ers. OCZ had a very good run with SandForce, winning best consumer SSD awards with both the Vertex 2 and a year later with Vertex 3. Just like Joe, the SandForce SF-2000 series is starting to look a little older and the young competition from other makers is starting to catch up. SandForce might offer the fastest controller to date, but that might not be the case starting next season.

Before Steve Young was traded to the 49ers he played in Tampa Bay. There he had two horrible seasons, but everyone could see the talent including 49ers head coach Bill Walsh. Indilinx, in their later years as a separate company was not competitive with controllers from Intel and Samsung. In a sense OCZ traded to pick up Indilinx, mainly their RAM and peripherals product lines (they were actually just dropped). In their yearly product cycle OCZ was ready to release something new, something fresh, but their star quarterback SandForce was injured. OCZ had already released an impressive top to bottom lineup of products based on the SandForce technology so there weren't any gaps to fill with SandForce based products.

Indilinx was called off the bench and although OCZ's first Indilinx infused Everest was not in a position at the time to displace SandForce at the top, the potential was there for the next season. That is where we are today.