Digitimes has an interesting interview with the CEO of Lite-On IT, Danny Liao. In the interview he talks about the shrinking market for optical disk drives (ODD) and how Lite-On is coping with that. The CEO tells that Lite-On is now moving towards SSDs but that the company is still selling a good amount of ODDs. The CEO claims that Lite-On is of the three largest global ODD suppliers. It seems that for computers, slim is in, thick is out as Lite-On saw an increase of revenue of slimline DVD writers/readers making it about 60% of the total drives sold. Te usual half-height drives are now good for about 40% of the revenue and drives for game consoles have dropped from 10% to 6-8%.
Interesting, and likely therefor Digitimes asked the Lite-On CEO if he expected that the height of ODDs would be even more reduced. According to Liao this isn't likely as decreasing the size from the currently used 9.5 mm to for e.g. 7 mm (used for e.g. SSDs and HDDs in Ultrabooks) will require heavy R&D investments and high production costs. And it's probably not worth it as Ultrabook demand isn't as high as was expected
