Page 125 - The Fourth Industrial Revolution
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Figure IV: Hard Drive Cost per Gigabyte (1980-2009)
Source: “a history of storage costs”, mkomo.com, 8 September 2009 88
An estimated 90% of the world’s data has been created in the past two years, and the amount of
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information created by businesses is doubling every 1.2 years. Storage has already become a
commodity, with companies like Amazon Web Services and Dropbox leading this trend.
The world is heading towards a full commoditization of storage, through free and unlimited access for
users. The best-case scenario of revenue for companies could potentially be advertising or telemetry.
Positive impacts
– Legal systems
– History scholarship/academia
– Efficiency in business operations
– Extension of personal memory limitations
Negative impact
– Privacy surveillance
Unknown, or cuts both ways
– Eternal memory (nothing deleted)
– Increased content creation, sharing and consumption
The shift in action
Numerous companies already offer free storage in the cloud, ranging from 2 GB to 50 GB.
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