Western Digital: Will Diversification Pay?

I track (infrequently) Western Digital (NYSE:WDC) for personal investment. Today’s note in Tech Trader Daily on WDC ratings cut prompted me to think on WDC’s product portfolio. The disk business seems to under tremendous pressure. WDC has diversified into new products such as Consumer NAS and  Medial Players. WDC has several media players, and they do seem to get interesting reviews.

Image Courtesy: http://www.wdc.com

The media player is getting to be very, very crowded – Roku, Boxee, Google TV, Apple TV, Vudu, Internet-enabled TVs from Sony, Vizio, Samsung etc. WDC needs to add value – they lack content – at this point of time they are just another player. Given their Storage assets, they need to combine the media player element with the storage and even attempt to change the channel to more of an OEM channel just as they do for their hard drives.

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