Flooding in Thailand is wreaking havoc on hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers.  The consumer retail market will likely be hit hard by shortages and price increases, analysts say. Two industry research firms, IHS iSuppli and IDC, have predicted that the overall market shortage due to factory flooding in Thailand will reach 25% to 28% over the next six months.

The largest producer of hard drives, Western Digital is expected to be hit the hardest as IDC predicts that up to 75% of its production will be temporarily shut down, IDC said today.

IHS iSuppli said fourth quarter hard drive shipments will decline by 27.7% to 125 million units, from 173 million shipped in the third quarter. Users should expect to see price increases of some 10% over the third quarter. Toshiba and Western Digital have announced a temporary shutdown of Thailand factories.  Toshiba has reported water is 2 meters deep in its storage device plant and 3 meters deep in its semiconductor factory in Thailand.

NEWS FLASH: The lengthy legal warning at the bottom of corporate emails is LEGALLY TOOTHLESS.  These days, even the most innocuous messages – “Sure, ice cream at 6 sounds great” – sent from corporate email account are larded with dense legalese that is universally unread as the health advisories on beer bottles.  But the ominous warnings that you must obliterate, incinerate, and forget any email not intended for you don’t actually mean anything, according to legal experts.

“You have no obligation to obey the disclaimer if you decide to read a misdirected email, send it to your friend….”says Susan Lyon, a privacy and data security attorney for Perkins Coie.  “You don’t have to worry about that.”

The IRS requires that those involved in giving tax advice include certain legal disclaimers, but most others are EMPTY THREATS.  So why do companies bother?  The sad answer is that the verbiage relieves manager’s anxieties about how easily secrets can slip through the digital firewall, even though it does nothing to stop suck leaks.  But since everyone’s doing it, everyone will continue doing it.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said yesterday that Windows 8 will debut in 2012, although the company later called his comments a “misstatement.”

“We’re obviously hard at work on the next version of Windows,” Ballmer said, according to a transcript posted on Microsoft’s own press site. “Windows 7 PCs will sell over 350 million units this year. We’ve done a lot in Windows 7 to improve customer satisfaction. We have a brand new user interface. We’ve added touch, and ink, and speech. And yet, as we look forward to the next generation of Windows systems, which will come out next year, there’s a whole lot more coming. As we progress through the year, you ought to expect to hear a lot about Windows 8.