Improbable Insights

It began with a Tweet from Leslie Carhart about buying Windows 2.0. In that tweet, she included an image of a receipt ca. 1988: [caption id="attachment_402" align="alignleft" width="300"] Note the first item: 40MB IDE hard drive... for $699.[/caption] Back in 1988, a 40MB hard drive costs a cool $699. Today, you can buy a 2TB SSD for $699 -- 50,000x the capacity, and vastly better performance. Meaning That got me thinking about how we perceive technology advances. We tend to think of tech advances as both inexorable and linear; think Moore's Law. In fact, technology advances tend to be discontinuous. A particular tech may improve in a linear fashion, then suddenly supplanted by something else. We've seen SSDs rapidly replace HDDs in many applications. As SSD storage approaches hard drive capacities and prices drop, SSDs become incredibly attractive. As with past discontinuities, the companies benefiting tend to be new companies, not companies entrenched with the old tech. Eric Klein, David Bryant and I rif