23 August 2007

My life on a memory stick

By Jim Pinto

The other day I bought a 1GB memory stick off Amazon.com at $4.95. I had bought a 100MB stick just about a year ago for $75. Already 5 and 10-gig sticks are available, and I expect to buy those soon—dirt-cheap.

Now the terabyte, or 1,000 GB, hard disk is getting down to the level where we can afford to buy one, two, or three. How will this affect the way we work?

No one would have bought a $10,000 iPod two or three years ago. As flash-memory and tiny hard disk prices came down, MP3 players started taking root. Launched in 2001, Apple has sold over 100 million iPods since then. So, what are the new products that will become practical with cheap memory?

Business models will continue to change as memory becomes cheaper. Overwhelming cheapness of storage will cause anyone to save anything and everything. However, that is useful only when you quickly and easily can find a specific saved item. This will continue to drive the importance of search-engines. It is already much easier and faster to look up a phone number on Google, than to look it up in the yellow pages. The phone books keep piling up on my front door, and often go straight to recycling. Why do I need a bulky phone “book?”

Over the next decade, cheap memory will be available to anyone and everyone, and its impact will continue to increase. There will be space to store whatever you wish to recall—pictures of people, words you hear, whatever you thought worth recording. Your life will be archived, and your archive will be your life.

Of course, new problems will surface. What if I lose my 10-gig memory stick? In addition, what if it falls into the wrong hands?

Related links:

• The First Terabyte Hard Drive:
  http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2131552,00.asp
• Life Without Hard Disk Drives:
  http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/histWithout-c.html
• Kryder’s Law - disk memory doubling:
  http://www.jimpinto.com/enews/july25-2005.html#3

Behind the byline

Jim Pinto is an industry analyst and founder of Action Instruments. You can e-mail him at jim@jimpinto.com or view his writings at www.JimPinto.com. Read the Table of Contents of his book, Pinto’s Points, at www.jimpinto.com/writings/points.html.