Can hard disk and solid state drive makers work together? Maybe on some standards, intellectual property licensing or on a common nomenclature. But that's about it.

The two camps are just in such a fierce battle targeting the same market segments (consumer, desktops, enterprise...) albeit a different approach but with an underlying converging technology, that is hard to see how they can cooperate. And in this war, the consumer is the main beneficiary as prices should continue to drop while capacities increase.

Anyway, after listening to Sandisk talk about the netbook market opportunity for the SSD maker at lunch, it was amusing to hear from one of the leader of the hard disk drive industry, John Coyne, Westerm Digital CEO (pictured), that 80% of netbooks actually ship with a hard drive and not an SSD. Reality check anyone?

In his keynote tonight, Coyne also addressed the huge market opportunities in emerging markets, what he called the next 1 to 5 billion users. However, the industry should still continue to innovate for the "rich", the first billion users, that need faster and higher capacity drives.

"There are 2 [opportunities]. One is basically what we've been doing for years, which is addressing solutions for rich people... The other huge opportunity that we have as yet untapped is to focus on the next level of economic development", Coyne said.

In 2012, well over 50% of the market will be PCs costing under $500. Look at Intel low-cost strategy

So for Coyne, the real opportunity for the hard disk drive industry in the short to medium term is to focus on markets outside the U.S., Western Europe... and the low end markets in those developed countries. But in order to be competitive in emerging markets where PC prices could be as low as $75 (sic!), the drive maker will need to engineer super low cost drives.

"If we're smart, we'll do like Intel have done it: they began to fuel this move to lower cost with a high cost, low margin, low price offering of a double down version of their standard product offering. And having got the ball rolling they followed up with a low cost specifically designed for applications. Which is the Atom chip: low cost, high margin, low price. Which is the way to go about this kinds of markets... But it takes focus and guts to go design products for a market that have lower ASPs but huge potentials... But to me this is a huge validation of the opportunity for our industry if we're "Man" enough to go grasp it".

72 GB is all you need to store 24 hours of your life!

"We could in fact record our entire life experience... The technology will exist very shortly... If we recording everything we saw, everything we heard during 24 hours and storing it in a hard drive, we will store 72 hours each day".

Reality Check: 80% of Netbooks ship with a 2.5" hard drive, not an SSD!

Another challenge facing the hard disk drive industry is to make sure the PC makers keep a "drive slot" in their machines.

"As long as there is a drive slot in the chassis, our solution will be preferred. Last year, ASUS came out with EeePC... And it came out with Flash on the motherboard... Not a good idea from our perspective. A lot of work done behind the scene and interesting that almost everybody else that brought out a system this year in that category has a 2.5" drive slot. And 80% of those systems were likely shipped with a 2.5" drive in that slot and the other 20% will ship with an SSD in that slot. Because the value proposition of drives is so superior... 6 months ago when we talking to the folks making the plans, it was more 30% hard drives, 70% SSDs... So our job is to keep that slot in the system. As long as there is a slot in the system, the compelling value [of the hard drive] will take care of the rest", adds the Western Digital CEO.

Yet, another way to compete with SSDs is to bring down the price point for the low end disk drives to about $24. "It will take a year and a half to reach that goal. But we have to rethink the way we make hard drives because we can not just take our current low end drives and hope to lower the cost by 20%", insists Coyne. Those future low end drives will be very similar in performance than the SSD of that category. "There's no need for a 7,500 RPMs drive for example", he says.

Western Digital CEO calls for an industry-wide joint research development to reduce costs and accelerate innovation and most importantly keep Flash drive makers at bay!

"There's an opportunity for consolidating our spent on fundamental process research. As an industry we all need to do some form of discrete track recording, assisted recording, and as an industry we can significantly do a better job than a bunch of independents going down the wrong road".