"In the IT world, it's a battle for your home. buys Iomega to get a footprint in the home, Sony and Microsoft put games consoles with huge hard drives in there, and Apple becomes a real winner. All of the players want to put their hardware in your home and sell you a service on top of it. We sell more storage into the home than we do to businesses -- and we own 60-something per cent of that."

Watkins says that about a third of all disk storage in the world is held on Seagate drives, adding, "The underlying phenomenon of digitising your life is very real... and we are very excited about the opportunities for storage."

Watkins dismisses suggestions that items like Apple's iPod are a threat to his firm and its business. "In order to get content in your hand, you need enterprise storage in the cloud," he says. "[Apple's] iTunes has got to have a big storage system, then they have to download it to a notebook or a PC into your hand. That whole ecosystem requires four or five different types of storage. Storage has to grow to compensate."

This small-device storage market, which includes other popular consumer devices like mobile phones does not appeal to Watkins. "There isn't any money in it. I don't need to get into a market I can't make money in. Whether it is Micron or Samsung or SanDisk, they are selling at a loss. I could do one now; doing a product is not a big deal, but making money out of it is important," he says.

What about online storage, and services in the cloud? "Everywhere storage is deployed, it drives the need for storage. As soon as I can make money I will jump all over it. We don't think you will store much on the web. The cost of bandwidth is pretty expensive. To download movies like that when you want to watch them... there would have to be quantum leaps in bandwidth. People will keep it local, two or three terabytes of storage all in one place is the most economical way of storing and serving your media."