Iomega president resigns amid leadership trouble with board

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Bruce Albertson, chief executive and president of Iomega Corp. has resigned amid “differences’’ between his and the board of directors’ goals for the computer hardware maker.Albertson, a protege of General Electric chairman and chief executive Jack Welch, was lured out of retirement in late 1999 to take the helm at Iomega, he told The Associated Press in an interview in March.Chris Romoser, a company spokesman, declined to comment on Albertson’s resignation Monday, deferring instead to a company press release.“Bruce’s resignation is, in large part, the result of differences between Bruce and the Board over the long-term strategic direction of the company,’’ said David J. Dunn, chairman of Iomega’s board of directors, in a statement.In e-mail response to a query about his resignation on Monday night, Albertson had no comment.During the March AP interview, he boasted that Iomega had shown five straight quarters of profitability, beginning with the last quarter of 1999, following seven consecutive quarters with losses.“We feel pretty good about the excitement of the whole company being reinvented,’’ he said.During Albertson’s brief tenure Iomega revamped nearly its entire product line and introduced a new digital photography oriented drive as well as software.A securities analyst who follows the Roy, Utah-based maker of computer zip drives and other portable storage devices called the move “bad news for the company.’’Stan Corker, Director of Technology Research for Emerald Research, said Iomega has stumbled in the last four years because of problems with marketing and leadership turmoil.Albertson’s hiring a year and a half ago signaled a turn around, he said.“The real issue is that the chairman of the board runs this (company) as if it were his own,’’ he said. “He handcuffs his CEOs and prevents them from doing the right thing, then they get frustrated and (leave).’’ When he took over in 199, Albertson became the company’s fourth CEO in 15 months.Calls left for Dunn by the AP were not immediately returned.Iomega manufactures and markets Zip and other storage drives that help people save large amounts of data on computers.The 21-year-old company grew exponentially in the mid-1990s. In 1994, Iomega made $141 million in revenue. In 1997, they had jumped to $1.74 billion. For the last four years, revenue has steadily declined, coming in at $1.3 billion in 2000.