There are two separate goals: improving the speed with which data may be accessed on a tape and improving that speed to the point where it will compete with hard disk drives - or to drive home how important it is to keep these goals distinct, solid state drives.

I'm not saying that future tape technologies will be as fast as the hard drives of the equivalent future - linear access has inherent limitations. However, there are relatively simple ways in which data access could be improved and such improvements (and some tuning) could make tape adequate for some applications.