Today, I received an email from eCost. I stay on their mailing list just to be aware of what’s out there and at what price. Todays mailing contained a 1 terabyte external hard drive unit (2 x 500 GB RAID) for $195. So essentially you can have your own file server or two at home with all sorts of junk in them. Well, if you have a lot of junk, you need to do something with it.The problem that exists today is not storage or lack of software. But the fact that computing horsepower is not cheap enough or at a point where computation intensive applications can be enjoyed by the masses. And I do not mean the additional hardware requirements of Vista.
Hardware in essence has not kept up with the innovations in software. Try encoding a 100mb movie using Flash CS2 or 3 and see what I mean. With base PC specs on any system from any vendor, the wait is substantial where you really cannot do anything else with your PC. You may argue that video editing or encoding is not an activity for the masses. Well if that is the case then why have 1 TB drives and games and applications, that require a fairly high level of computer horsepower, that are affordable? The bar on entry level processors clearly needs to be raised. And Vista may not be the application to do it.
If you visit a website like say PaperVision3d.org which utilizes intensive 3d models within Flash, you can see that the web is going to get a lot of more interactive in the future. Check your processor usage and you’re sure to see a substantial spike with this one application. Such online application will create a need for people to invest in faster processors more than anything else because interactive web is truly a product for mass consumption. Perhaps the next big processor upgrade cycle will be web driven rather than OS driven and I am going to pick up some Intel stock.
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