When I wrote Discarded Tech a few days ago, I mentioned the virtual uselessness of floppy disks.

An Silicon.com article from today echoes this sentiment, but includes a statistic – which, if correct – is very surprising to me:

The global market for floppy disks has been in decline since the late 1990s, with 700 million estimated to have been sold last year compared with more than two billion in 1998.

— Floppy disks to disappear from PC World, Silicon.com. Jan. 30, 2007

The surprising part – to me – is that so many floppy disks were sold last year relative to the peak: 0.7 billion this year vs. 2.0 billion in 1998, a peak year.

Sure, a 50% plus decline, but my personal experience is about a 99% decline since 1998.

I don’t even use Zip disks, which – for a few years – supplanted the floppy disks.

Now it’s USB thumb drive, burn to CD or DVD disc, FTP, G-mail and so on.

I carry a floppy in my briefcase at all times (and a Zip drive and a thumb drive); haven’t had to replace it anytime recently.

Those stats sound suspect to me…