Bill Gates is notorious for his entertaining industry fortune telling. For every incisive industry prediction, he likes to deliver several crazy notions to counteract it.
So it was hugely disappointing when Gates failed to deliver any more daft predictions at this month’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Gates is famous for these forecasts, and usually reminds me of a 1970s Tomorrow’s World presenter, looking ahead and telling us that we will all ride around in rocket cars and wear clothes made of tinfoil.
To be fair, smart predictions are not those that say what might happen, but when. For example, 1999 was supposed to be the year in which the bulk of the computer display market would tip away from bulky CRT monitors towards flat-screen LCD panels. As things turned out, it didn’t, so the futurists predicted it for 2000. Then 2001, then 2002, and then 2003. It finally happened around 2004.
Technology pundits have been making inaccurate predictions about the personal storage market for even longer than this.
The demise of the magnetic spinning hard disk has been mooted annually since the early 1990s. But Samsung’s announcement at CES that it is beginning to ship 64GB Flash drives, with 128GB models to follow in a couple of months, is exciting the storage punters all over again. A company called BitMicro Electronics even said it plans to produce an 832GB solid state disk (SSD) by the end of this year.
If you could have the best part of a terabyte in ultra-slim, ultra-light and shock-proof SSD format, would anybody bother to continue lugging around a heavyweight, disk-based pocket drive that struggles to offer a mere 100GB?
As in the case of LCD monitors, however, Flash storage still needs to provoke a tipping point in its market before any revolution takes place. Capacity is just one factor in this. Performance is another, and Samsung’s promise of 70MB/s write and 100MB/s read is at last encroaching on the 100MB/s of many conventional hard disks, if still a way off the highest performance drives.
Oh, and price matters. Flash memory is still around four to five times more expensive per gigabyte than hard drives.
Yet the LCD revolution showed that a new technology does not need to be bigger, faster or cheaper to force a tipping point. All it needs is to close the gap, and then any inherent advantage it has will win the day. Although LCD monitors were still up to three times the price of their CRT equivalents in 2004, it was ultimately their style and space-saving form factor that worked in their favour.
So what is the killer feature of SSD? Conventional wisdom says it is removable storage, but I think quite the opposite. Built-in high-capacity Flash drives would make laptops much lighter and slimmer, while extending battery life dramatically. It could also transform executive toys such as smartphones into something truly powerful and genuinely practical.
Whether that means we will all soon be wearing wristwatch videophones or Intel-powered socks, I’ll leave such predictions to the futurists.
