| Peter Sealey's Ten Trends
(trend 1)
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Bandwidth continues to grow exponentially, expanding by 300% each year, and the pipes are only going to get larger. Korean consumers already have thirty megabit per second DSL. At a conference last month in San Diego, CA, a company brought in something called 4K video from Tokyo: four thousand lines of resolution. They sent it from Tokyo to the U.C. San Diego campus. That's a 10 gigabit pipe coming from Tokyo to Chicago, Seattle and then down to San Diego. One of the benefits of the 2000 debacle is that we have thousands of miles of dark fiber optic cable in this country. That is like building an interstate highway, except that we didn't have any on-ramps or exit ramps. Now we are now going to put those in. So, the availability of bandwidth is going to be enormous. Storage costs. The amazing new iPod Nano has a four gigabyte flash memory in something the size of about four or five business cards put together. Storage cost is going to be essentially zero.
And, finally Moore's Law, a.k.a. Processing Power. In 1967, Gordon Moore predicted that processing power would double every eighteen months and that the cost would be cut in half. He was right Last February, John Markoff wrote about a new microprocessor in the New York Times. It is called Cell, developed by IBM and Sony. It has nine separate processors enabling two hundred and fifty-six billion calculations per second, and it is about the size of a pushpin. There are two hundred and twenty-one million transistors on this CPU. Now, the power of a CPU goes up with the square of the number of transistors, so the power and potential of this thing are astonishing. First use? The Sony PlayStation 3. Five years ago, it would have been among the world's fastest supercomputers. Today, it costs $80.00. Drivers of Economic Growth
The twentieth century drivers of growth were manufacturing, transportation, and agriculture. That was it. We had three to four percent annual increases in productivity. In this country in 1900, two of the largest demographic groups were domestic servants and farmers. The twentieth century was a movement of that group into manufacturing -- peaking at 37 percent around the time Kennedy was President, and then those two groups started to move into the service sector. Three to four percent annual increases in productivity built the developed world. We are now down to thirteen percent of our work force in manufacturing (this country is still producing twenty percent of the manufactured goods on the planet, but not as many people are involved). Only two and a half percent of our population works in agriculture. I don't know if there even are domestic servants anymore. We have squeezed all we can squeeze out of those twentieth century technologies. In contrast, growth in the twenty-first century will come from abundant processing power, bandwidth and ultra-cheap storage, and this will result in whopping fifteen to twenty percent annual increases in productivity in areas driven by these factors. Back in 1981, IBM introduced the PC. For the next ten years we made it into a word processor. In other words, we got nothing out of the PC for the first ten years. That's no longer the case. Now, these productivity games are coming, and we have been changed into an information-based society populated by knowledge workers. Forget the twentieth century. This is a new world. The great news? Boy, are we on a roll with these factors.
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Mega-Trends -- bandwidth, the cost of storage and processing power
