History is full of unfortunate claims made by the industry leaders, government forerunners and arrogant scientists. Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate Technologies, will be the next one on that infamous list, which contains Sony’s Betacam and ATRAC bets and Kodak’s digital-photography inertia, in my opinion.

The Fortune blogpost covers the perspective of Seagate CEO on the recent developments in flash-based hard disk drives (so-called Solid State Drives) that potentially present significant drop in weight, operational noise and increase in durability. As the biggest producer of hard disk drives in the world, and as one of the best stock price performers in the market, Seagate has the privileged position to drive the market convergence towards SSDs and take a major stake from the growth to come. In a world that mobility is highly appreciated, a leader has to occasionally leave his ivory tower and look beyond what his organization possess today. Although I don’t the impact would be of the same magnitude, I expect a big crash for Seagate in a similar way that Kodak lately realized that they made a huge mistake ignoring the rise of digital photography…

As always, here is the real deal. As of today, Nasdaq is at 2268 and Seagate (STX) is at 21.73$. We will see what happens with the rise of SSDs…