The
price of electronic memory and computer storage and will continue to fall over
the next several years. This will cause a significant revolution in the way many
things are done. Your company can find growth through a cheap revolution.
The
impact of cheap memory
If
you've worked with computers for a decade (and who hasn't?), you remember the
360K floppy disk; and the standard PC with 640K of RAM, fully loaded. Then came
the high-density floppy, which held 1.44MB; and RAM extensions to a few
megabytes. And hard disks had as much as 50-100MB, which was considered to be
huge! Bigger hard disks were connected only to mainframes, at tens of thousands
of dollars.
Now, most PCs have about 250-512 Mbytes of RAM and cheap storage is
everywhere. 700 MB CD-memory costs less than a buck – who uses a floppy
anymore? And you can get 100-gigabyte hard disks (that's 100,000 megabytes) at a
buck a gigabyte. Within a decade, the $100 hard disk will hold a terabyte –
1,000 gigabytes. Wanna bet?
Moore's Law (the doubling of computing power) and Gilder's Law (doubling
of bandwidth) are being outpaced by mass storage for three reasons:
1.
Keeping pace with Moore's law in silicon is becoming more and more
expensive, as the cost of a semiconductor fab rises beyond $3 billion.
2.
Because of the current business recession, telecomm capital and
regulatory politics have slowed down the bandwidth explosion, far below Gilder's
gilded projections.
3.
Mass storage is relatively simple: Writing and reading, magnetically or
optically, with higher and higher densities.
In the future, the overwhelming cheapness of storage will cause anything
and everything to be saved. But that is useful only when a specific saved item
can be found, quickly and easily. This will continue to drive the importance of
fast, smart search-engines. It is already much easier and faster to look up a
telephone number on Google, than to look it up manually in a phone book. Google
has become preeminent because of its valuable search algorithms. In an
information-storage-based world, "search intelligence" attains major
proprietary value to drive a knowledge-based economy.
During the next decade, cheap storage 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.
The media copyright problem
Today,
digital objects like e-books, MP3 music and digital movies can be duplicated
quickly and easily, and each copy is as good as the original. So, the ability to
digitize and transfer intellectual property from one PC to another is a serious
problem that has authors, musicians, artists, photographers, software
programmers and publishers at odds with each other and their customers.
An
entire music library, several thousands of relatively high-quality MP3 files can
sit on a relatively inexpensive disk or electronic memory. As disk space becomes
cheaper, traditional media business models will continue to change. For media
companies, revenue from recorded audio and video (DVDs) will continue to
decrease as downloaded copies proliferate.
Most
people recognize the value of authorship and intellectual property, but many do
not see why the publishers, distributors and other intermediaries should get
most of the money. There seem to be no clear ethical barriers against copying
widely available media. And with storage becoming cheaper, the barriers continue
to come down.
Declining
prices bring problems – and opportunities
In
the late 1990s, when INTEL-based servers dropped below $1 per MIP (millions of
instructions per second), there was a paradigm shift – within a couple of
years big, expensive servers were replaced by cheapie PCs. Then came Linux
servers that replaced Unix servers costing hundreds of thousands of dollars
apiece.
George
Gilder calls this the Cheap Revolution, bringing serious decline and significant
opportunity in its path. Will the technology leaders be able to survive this?
Will IBM, EMC and CISCO be disappearing like Wang and DEC? Today they are
walking the tightrope between yesterday's cash cows and tomorrow's
uncertainties.
Many
industrial Automation.companies are poised on that same delicate ledge. A PLC is
simply a collection of microprocessors and memory, with firmware that is
relatively easy to duplicate. Therefore, the functionality of a PLC that cost
thousands of dollars a few years ago is now available at a fraction of the cost.
Similarly,
a DCS or SCADA system today is a PC with widely available and easy-to-copy
software. I/O and other hardware and firmware extensions are also becoming
commodity products for the same reasons. Proprietary hardware and software
designs are relatively easy to emulate, and the proprietary content is very
difficult to protect.
How
to win the cheap revolution
At
the 3rd annual Gilder/Forbes Storewidth Conference, Clayton Christensen from
Harvard Business School outlined 3 ways to escape the Cheap Revolution's
unrelenting margin pressure:
-
Improve your product offerings faster than anybody else. This
tactic works for market leaders with a good brand name, a strong
distribution channel and financial clout. It works as long as the market
wants the added functionality and is willing to pay for it.
-
Sell fast custom solutions that answer customer's needs. Despite
its size, IBM has done this by going modular and bringing along a horde of
third-party solutions providers, enabling it to move quickly.
-
For smaller companies - find an un-served market and grab market
share by selling cheap. The product or service must be so cheap that
industry leaders think there's no money in it and walk away.
A
good example of finding success in un-served markets is how Sony served
teenagers with transistor radios in the '50s. The leaders (RCA, Philco) were
selling pricey tabletop vacuum-tube radios, figuring that tinny-sounding
transistors would never be competitive. By serving the un-served, Sony got a
toehold in consumer electronics and never looked back.
Industrial
Automation examples
Thirty
years ago Action Instruments, the company I founded, pulled off a cheap
revolution with Action Pak. When inexpensive low-drift DC op-amps became
available, we built thermocouple and RTD signal-conditioners, sensor amplifiers,
transmitters, limit alarms, PID controllers into small, low cost, plug-in relay
modules. These replaced the bulky panel-mounted instruments offered by the
larger instrument companies, costing several times as much. Within a decade, we
had sold half-a-million Action Pak modules and generated leadership in a new
business category called “auxiliary instruments”. Today, there are several
clones, but Action Pak is still the undisputed leader.
In a tough, seemingly declining market, how can YOU make the Cheap
Revolution work for YOUR Company?
Related links:
Wired
magazine: Shifting into overdrive:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.05/view.html?pg=5
Forbes:
The big cheap chance:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2003/0428/037.html?_requestid=1789
Jim
Pinto is an industry analyst and commentator, writer, technology entrepreneur,
investor and futurist. You can email him at jim@jimpinto.com.
Or look at his poems, prognostications and predictions on his website: www.JimPinto.com
