Changing The World One Bit At A Time
Usually, the CEO stays on message throughout the meal as a PR flak hovers, smiles, nods and prods the conversation along. Just keep the drinks coming, guys. Not so with Bill Watkins, the mercurial, salty-mouthed Texan who runs the $15 billion hard-drive king Seagate Technology. At a San Francisco dinner on Tuesday evening, he was candid about his company’s ultimate mission: “Let’s face it, we’re not changing the world. We’re building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn.”
I totally disagree with Mr Watkins.
A lot of quantitative changes become a qualitative change.
Harddisks store more and cost less.
Its not just harddisks, of course - its data storage in general. All the kinds of data storage technology before harddisks and since, simply store more for less.
For example, consider the little postage-stamp sized ‘memory cards’ we put in our digital cameras. I had bought a 512 megabyte one for £50 about a year ago, from a cheap online store, but its now just £10 from the local supermarket.
And today £50 of Seagate harddisk buys 20 times that amount of data in a harddisk about one inch square.
Soon, the combined total of the Wikimedia projects will fit in our hands - on our mobile phones. And although its not widely known yet, the release of laptops for £50-and-falling is imminent. All the important books, the greatest encyclopedia in history, all the textbooks, all the quotes, and the dictionary to understand them. All we need is to be able to read.
A moment later, it will be possible for all the music and video ever published to join them. People are willing to risk harsh penalties to break unjust laws and eventually have them thrown away.
They have, are, and will change the world.
The Changing The World One Bit At A Time by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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