Finis Conner

Finis Conner (born July 28, 1943 in Gadsden , Alabama ) is an American entrepreneur and pioneer in the hard drive industry.

Conner grew up in a poor family as the fifth child of a carpenter in Alabama, Texas and Florida . When he was 19, he went to San José and worked as a clerk for IBM while he caught up with college. In 1969 he received a degree in industrial management from San José State College . When he later worked at Memorex, he became the right-hand man and protégé of Alan Shugart .

He founded Shugart Associates in 1973 with Shugart and seven other Shugart Associates , a pioneer in floppy disk development that was acquired by Xerox in 1977 . At Shugart Associates, he built a reputation for being a great salesperson. In 1979 he founded the hard drive manufacturer Seagate Technology with Shugart , for which he designed the 5.25-inch hard drive format. Around 1984 there were differences with the management of Seagate, because, according to Conner, they did not respond enough to customer requests. He lived in semi-retirement (with $ 12 million Seagate shares) before he decided to join a company owned by John Squires, which developed smaller hard drives (3.5 inch). In 1986 they founded Conner Peripherals (with Conner bringing in their own previously founded company), the first to develop 3.5 and 2.5 inch hard disk drives. He found the initial capital of 12 million US dollars at Compaq , which was looking for suitable hard drives for the laptops in development and also became one of the main customers of Conner Peripherals. In 1987 they had sales of 117 million US dollars (mostly from Compaq) and in 1989 they had around 700 million (about a third from Compaq). At the end of the 1980s, they were the fastest growing start-up company in the USA and led the competition for lighter, more compact and less power-consuming hard drives. They were acquired by Seagate in 1996 (most recently they had sales of $ 2.7 billion).

In 2010 he became CEO of Millenniata in Provo , Utah , which specializes in long-life optical archiving technology (on the M-Disc , read and written with the M-Writer).

Web links

• Portrait at Conner Storage

Individual evidence

1. ^ Andrew Pollack: A novel idea: customer satisfaction , New York Times May 27, 1990 , with a portrait of Conner
2. ↑ Report to Storage Newsletter ( Memento of the original from January 8, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.