Ray Ozzie gave his first speech as Microsoft's Chief Software Architect last week at a Financial Analyst Meeting in Redmond.
I see some fundamental changes afoot, technology changes that will afford significant economic opportunity for those prepared to take advantage of the market implications of such a technology shift. Just as in the past, the changes before us are being catalyzed by the steady march in the progress of technology, a confluence of factors that Richard Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes, has coined "the cheap revolution": cheap computing, cheap storage, cheap communications. You're all familiar with Moore's Law, and what it enabled in terms of the increasing power of PCs and handheld devices. The phone in my pocket has a processor 10 times faster than the fastest supercomputers that I used in college—has 10 times as much memory. A 1-gigabyte flash memory card costs 25 bucks, and your laptop has a 100-gigabyte disk. And this is just incredible, given where we’ve come from.
The computing and storage trends of the past 20 years have taken the PC far beyond its roots in productivity, transforming it into an amazing device that's also used for creating and editing and storing and consuming vast libraries of digital media. And the impact of these trends of course hasn't been just limited to PCs; even phones are now being transformed beyond their roots in communications into amazing devices for when you’re on the go, wherever you are—viewing and capturing media—devices that automatically annotate photos and audio and video with things such as time and location and even the direction you're facing in some cases.
The cheap revolution has catalyzed seemingly relentless innovation and the creation of an amazing range of smart and powerful devices, devices that are the entry points—the edge—of our computing, communications and entertainment experiences, from laptops to rich media editing workstations, from digital cameras to hard disk camcorders, from smart phones to media players to the Xbox 360—everything has got a processor and memory and an increasingly huge amount of storage. And everything today directly or indirectly now also connects to Internet-based services.
The infrastructure supporting those Internet services has itself also been transformed by the cheap revolution. 1,000-gigabyte servers, terabyte servers, have now become quite commonplace, making it economically viable for the first time to create vast data centers that are built from low-cost PC-like commodity hardware. These data centers are enabling us to provide a number of services—remote computing, remote storage and application services—a centralized services platform to a billion users of the Internet worldwide.
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