Saturday 3 November 2012

Tweet of the Day – 3 November 2012

One for the IT geeks, from FactHive, re-formatted for ease of reading...

"Price of 1 gigabyte of storage over time:
  • 1981 $300,000
  • 1987 $50,000
  • 1990 $10,000
  • 1994 $1,000
  • 1997 $100
  • 2000 $10
  • 2004 $1
  • 2012 $0.10 "

In fact, this was tweeted a couple of days ago, but I don't follow FactHive (I hadn't even heard of the account before) and picked it up from a re-tweet dated today. I thought it might be of interest to at least a few of my regular readers, so worthy of inclusion in this series.

The point this tweet makes is of course the old one about the costs of any particular technology reducing over time. Once the costs of developing a new technology have been recouped, that can come off the sale price of the end product, aided also by refinement in production techniques gained with experience, mass-production when it goes mainstream in the marketplace, and competition from others in the same line of business.

It happened with pocket calculators (originally sold for well over £100, now often given away with something else) and many other technology-based innovations. I saw a lot of it happen within the hi-fi market during my time working in that sector's retail business, so for me it is old hat: I've known of the phenomenon for more than four decades now.

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