04/13/19 HOW IOMEGA LOST ITS ZIP In recent months, enraged customers of Iomega Corp. have been filling homegrown Web sites with angry tales of the ''click of death.'' That's the sound that Zip drives, Iomega's popular computer storage devices, make when they malfunction. But Iomega Chief Executive Kim B. Edwards downplayed the trouble, saying it affected fewer than 1% of Zip drives.
Bad call. The click of death is the sort of operational snafu--along with other production and service lapses--that led to the kiss of death for Edwards. The hard-charging salesmeister--considered by many the top consumer marketer in the stodgy PC peripherals business--shocked the computer industry when he resigned on Mar. 25. ''We want to grow this company to $10 or $20 billion, not just go to $3 billion. To do that, you need to do things differently,'' says Chairman David J. Dunn, who named director James E. Sierk interim CEO while the company searches for a permanent chief.