Hmmmm.
Whilst I suspect a former Sun employee would know the stink of death and failure very well, I'm not so sure the spinning rust vendors are as dead as Shapiro seems to think. Seagate in particular has the muscle of Samsung behind them. I'm also not convinced with the focus on the hyperscale customers as there are so few of them compared to the average Joe companies that make up the bulk of the storage market. And 2.5in is not dead at all, it seems to be replacing 3.5in disk format with the real game changer being the shift to commodity-based array headers in multiples rather than pairs.
My prediction - Shapiro and co will soon be announcing yet another "me-too" all-flash array, and hopes he can talk spinning rust to death. Which is neatly ignoring the fact that tiering of data is still keeping even dead-slow-but-big-capacity-and-cheap SATA disks alive and healthy.