George Gilder: The Information Factories
George Gilder was a political writer who later turned his attention to information technology. At the time of the dot.com bubble his book "Telecosm" and his contributions in "Forbes ASAP" were widely read. After the dot.com bubble Gilder, like other dot.com gurus, were less visible on the the public stage. Now, in the wake of the Google-bubble, Gilder has returned with a useful and informative article in Wired 14.10.
In typical Gilder fashion, he mixes numbers that highlight the rapid advance of IT with strong one-liners:
"We are all petaphiles now"
"In the PC era. the winners were companies that dominated the microcosm of the silicon chip. The new age of petacomputing will be ruled by the masters of the remote data center - those who optimally manage processing power, electricity, bandwidth, storage, and location."
Googleplex, i.e. Google's data centers (about two dozen) comprise about 450,000 servers, 200 petabytes if hard disk storage, four petabytes of RAM, and Google responds to about 100,000,000 queries a day.
"... the cost-effectiveness of hard-drives grew 125 times faster than that of processors."
"By the byte, RAM is some 100 times more costly than disk storage."
"RAM can be accessed some 10,000 times faster than disks. So measured by access time, RAM is 100 times cheaper than disk storage."
"In every era, the winning companies are those that waste what is abundant ... in order to to save what is scarce."
"... the total of the energy consumed by major research engines in 2006 approaches 5 gigawatts."
"... the purpose of whatever comes next --- will be to serve the ultimate, and still the only general-purpose, petascale computer: the human brain."
RAEM
posted by RAE Mueller @ 2:47 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Gilder is a great writer and interesting thinker. He saw the explosive growth in information technology and projected a coincident growth in revenues - helping to fuel the boom and bust. (For example, it seemed a bit like he was saying "Today, people pay a penny for every gigabit of data, totaling a market of $1 billion. In five years, we'll be able to increase capacity to 1,000 gigabits, so as we're getting that penny per gigabit, the market will grow to $1 trillion." I realize that is a gross simplification of his points, but it had that feel at times.)
The question that so intrigues me has to do with company structure - how will organizations reconfigure their power, decision-making, and wealth-sharing models in response to this rapid growth in IT?
Gilder is a great writer and interesting thinker. He saw the explosive growth in information technology and projected a coincident growth in revenues - helping to fuel the boom and bust. (For example, it seemed a bit like he was saying "Today, people pay a penny for every gigabit of data, totaling a market of $1 billion. In five years, we'll be able to increase capacity to 1,000 gigabits, so as we're getting that penny per gigabit, the market will grow to $1 trillion." I realize that is a gross simplification of his points, but it had that feel at times.)
The question that so intrigues me has to do with company structure - how will organizations reconfigure their power, decision-making, and wealth-sharing models in response to this rapid growth in IT?
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