"In the early part of this decade, there was a movement
called FibreOn. The idea was to increase the market for Fibre
Channel by putting Fibre Channel chipsets on higher-end
motherboards. The plan failed miserably for reasons that I think
are pretty clear.
"First, SATA drives became denser than Fibre Channel drives,
their reliability increased, and their cost dropped compared to
Fibre Channel drives.
"Secondly, Fibre Channel chipsets were expensive, and vendors
such as Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) and HP/Compaq (NYSE: HPQ) had a
chicken-and-egg sales and marketing scenario. Since margins on PCs
were slim, building and designing a board with Fibre Channel chips
and plug-in SFPs would be a relatively high cost, so there had to
be a market for them, which never materialized, in part because
there wasn't much in the way of products. So FibreOn failed, and
during this time vendors started to add 1Gb Ethernet to their
boards."
