While putting together the manuscript for our new book, Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium, we met with Tom to discuss the current state of the floppy disk industry and the perks and challenges of running a business like his in the 2020s. What has changed in this era, and what remains the same?
Hi Tom, it’s great to finally meet the founder of floppydisks.com. We’d love to know a little more about your company. Let’s start with the obvious: how did you end up with the domain for floppydisks.com?
Were you already selling floppy disks at the time?
20 years ago I was actually in the floppy disk duplication business. Not in a million years did I think I would ever sell blank floppy disks. Duplicating disks in the 1980s and early 1990s was as good as printing money. It was unbelievably profitable. I only started selling blank copies organically over time. You could still go down to any office supply store, or any computer store to buy them. Why would you try to find me, when you could just buy disks off the shelf? But then these larger companies stopped carrying them or went out of business and people came to us. So here I am, a small company with a floppy disk inventory, and I find myself to be a worldwide supplier of this product. My business, which used to be 90% CD and DVD duplication, is now 90% selling blank floppy disks. It’s shocking to me.
How did your business initially come about?
I started out as a tax lawyer in Washington, DC. I became involved with a software company in California that was doing unique tax calculations. I left my practice with Price Waterhouse and moved to California with a little firm called Time Value Software. This was in the early ’90s. I had no software background whatsoever, but I had a good tax background. The idea was that I would use my tax expertise to work with programmers, and develop better software for tax practitioners.
I did that for about ten years. In the process, we developed a couple of different software applications. In the ’90s, the way you would distribute software would be by floppy disk, either on a 5.25-inch or a 3.5-inch disk. At one point we did a gigantic deal with a US payroll company for which we needed to copy hundreds of thousands of disks. We sent the work out to a third party who did the duplication for us. That was okay, but expensive, and it took a lot of time. The quality also wasn’t quite what we wanted it to be. So the next time we decided to do the floppy duplication in-house and we got our own equipment. This way we could distribute our software to our customers ourselves. (...)
Where does this focus on floppy disks come from? Why not work with another medium?
In the beginning, I figured we would do floppy disks, but never CDs. Eventually, we got into CDs and I said we’d never do DVDs. A couple of years went by and I started duplicating DVDs. Now I’m also duplicating USB drives. You can see from this conversation that I’m not exactly a person with great vision. I just follow what our customers want us to do. When people ask me: “Why are you into floppy disks today?” the answer is: “Because I forgot to get out of the business.” Everybody else in the world looked at the future and came to the conclusion that this was a dying industry. Because I’d already bought all my equipment and inventory, I thought I’d just keep this revenue stream. I stuck with it and didn’t try to expand. Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me.
by Niek Hilkmann & Thomas Walskaar, AIGA Eye on Design | Read more:
Image: Katharina Brenner
