The implications of continued rapid technological change
My posts last week about Obsolete technology and how Everything’s changing started some interesting conversations. Some argued against our prediction that anything that can be digitized will be digitized. Others seemed to think I was stating the obvious or hadn’t taken this line of thinking far enough.
What does the world look like if key technology trends continue? How do businesses and consumers respond to dramatically increased (and continually increasing) computing power, memory, and bandwidth?
Here are a few graphs showing progress so far. Processors are now so powerful and so cheap that handheld devices like an iPhone or a Droid perform like PCs of not too long ago.
The relentless march of Moore's Law
The cost of hard drives (and by extension server space and cloud storage) are falling so fast that we keep needing new terms ending in “-byte” to describe what is for sale or we will be talking about pennies: Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte, Petabyte, etc.
Data storage costs continue to plummet (Hard drive pricing as a proxy)
Meanwhile, broadband Internet access is widely available and download speeds are getting faster and faster. In 1999, the typical cable modem offer was $50/month for 600 Kbps. Today, $50 will get you 20-30 Mbps in many areas on fiber or cable’s DOCSIS 3.0, and leading players are beginning to roll out 100 Mbps offers.
The fastest available download speeds are becoming ever faster
These trends do not appear to be slowing. In fact, over the next few decades, these changes will fundamentally reshape the business landscape, our economy and our culture. This was the topic of a fascinating conversation earlier tonight, captured here by my friend Ariel Diaz.
Will ever greater computing power and ubiquitous broadband connectivity really enable us to transition from the “digitization of everything” to augmented reality to parallel virtual worlds? I don’t know. It sounds far-fetched today, but so does $50/month for 600 Kbps.
[...] We’ve been thinking a lot lately about why some things are free and some things are expensive – and, in particular, why so many more things are becoming free. Technological progress, asymmetric competition, and open innovation are relentlessly driving costs down and capabilities up. A prior post pointed out the innovation trajectory of processors, storage costs, and bandwidth. [...]