Thursday, August 19, 2010

abundance and scarcity

The 536,870,912 byte (512×2 20 ) capacity of t...

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I’m in the middle of a movie called “Welcome to Macintosh.”

You can guess what it’s about.

One guy was interviewed and he pulled out a price list from the original Apple computer. 16K of RAM cost $500.

Now, you can get about 1,000,000 times as much RAM for $30.

From the perspective of the digital revolution, we’ve moved from scarcity to abundance and our behaviors should change as well.

I thought about this as I looked at the way Tonka takes pictures on her iPod Touch. She keeps taking them. Doesn’t even think about the fact that she could ever “run out of space.”

I, on the other hand, still delete unnecessary files, since I came of age when memory was precious, not plentiful.

How this mentality of unlimited digital abundance will play out will be something to watch.

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