Mobile devices are about to become much more powerful, and storage is the reason. There have been three waves of evolution in portable storage, each of which has produced new product categories. The first development was affordable flash memory, allowing handhelds to carry hundreds of addresses and user-installed applications. That was enough to launch the PalmPilot, which created the market for personal digital assistants. The second wave was removable storage, using the Secure Digital, CompactFlash, or MemoryStick standards. Without the ability to pop data into and out of a device, we wouldn't have digital cameras. And the same basic technology, sealed into devices, powered the first generation of handheld MP3 music players. The third wave of portable storage was tiny hard drives, beginning with the 1.8 inch-wide Hitachi drives in Apple's iPod.
Very interesting observation. All through the eighties and most of the nineties, the storage improvements favored the personal computer. Moore's Law was a series of Christmas presents to Bill Gates.
But then when storage got really compressed, the focus shifted to mobile devices. And Microsoft has missed that. They missed the Internet, too, but they caught up with that pretty fast. I don't think they have a strategic vision for the mobile device revolution. I'm sure they think that they do, though.
Anyway, while I like the idea of mobile computing, and I certainly agree that new storage devices should make CD's obsolete, I am not as sold as Werbach is on the smaller form factors. I still like a real keyboard and a real screen. And then there's the issue of battery life, which doesn't seem to have a Moore's Law improvement factor.
