I find OCZ's current situation similar to the early 1990's 49ers. OCZ had a very good run with SandForce, winning best consumer SSD awards with both the Vertex 2 and a year later with Vertex 3. Just like Joe, the SandForce SF-2000 series is starting to look a little older and the young competition from other makers is starting to catch up. SandForce might offer the fastest controller to date, but that might not be the case starting next season.

Before Steve Young was traded to the 49ers he played in Tampa Bay. There he had two horrible seasons, but everyone could see the talent including 49ers head coach Bill Walsh. Indilinx, in their later years as a separate company was not competitive with controllers from Intel and Samsung. In a sense OCZ traded to pick up Indilinx, mainly their RAM and peripherals product lines (they were actually just dropped). In their yearly product cycle OCZ was ready to release something new, something fresh, but their star quarterback SandForce was injured. OCZ had already released an impressive top to bottom lineup of products based on the SandForce technology so there weren't any gaps to fill with SandForce based products.