Shifting Computing Perpetual Motion

from the what-makes-us-keep-buying dept

An interesting article at Forbes. It talks about how the "perpetual motion engine" that used to make everybody rush out and buy computers was a more powerful processor from Intel, which immediately was sucked up by a more processor hogging piece of software from Microsoft. Intel upgrades, Microsoft upgrades, everyone upgrades and the cycle continues. Except, that now, people are satisfied with what they've got from Microsoft. People aren't looking for the next processor hogging software product - and thus the upgrade craze for PCs may be slowing. Instead, he predicts that the next phase of this "perpetual motion" engine comes from three sources: sensory digitization, search and storage. The idea being that digital imaging (mostly thanks to Foveon) will get to be so good that you'll need more storage and search capabilities to store and find everything. It's an interesting theory. Near the end, though, he mentions bandwidth, saying he used to think that would be part of the perpetual motion engine. He doesn't think it will for now, because of regulation and the fact that it's too capital intensive. I think that for digital imagine to do what he wants it to do - bandwidth needs to show up also. People don't only want to have good images, they want to share them. If the highly compressed Foveon images are still a meg, it's going to be much more difficult to share them - making them less interesting to consumers.