You all remember floppy disks, right? They were the backbone of the first computer network -- the sneakernet. You could take your data with you. After floppies came hard drives, CDs, DVDs, and USB keys. When we put these in motion, we got Netflix and digital cameras. And when we connected them to the network, we got TiVo and iPods.
Pretty soon, in a year or so, you’ll be able to turn your iPod into an audio “TiVo” for HD radio that will give you access to publicly available songs whenever you want them. A little later, you’ll buy new products that capture and store ubiquitous wireless and Internet-based audio and video.
With each innovation you adopt, you and much of the world will, almost unawares, find yourself accelerating faster and faster down a very steep Storage Slope -- much steeper than the Bandwidth Slope, much steeper than the Processing Slope (also known as Moore’s Law), and ultimately much more powerful than either of them.
Where will it all end? I think it will end in a Dark Alley. That’s right: a dark, albeit figurative, alley. There, someone is going to creep out of the shadows and say, “Psst. Do you want to buy all the jazz music ever recorded? One hundred bucks and it’s yours.” And you’ll hand over the cash (or its electronic equivalent) and take back 10 terabytes worth of music -- enough for four hours of listening with no repetition every day for the rest of your life.
With that single act, no more than a few years in the future, copyright law will disintegrate – and, with it, the last impediment to unlimited, virtually free storage. All of Sinatra in a thumbnail-sized box for $10? Why not? Even the most ethical of us will succumb. Hollywood’s business model will crumble. Another communications monolith will be left wondering what hit it.
I’m not advocating it. I’m just making a simple observation about basic human nature. (For a different take, see my partner Greg Blonder’s column.)
Many of us have had trouble seeing the Storage Revolution coming. Twenty years ago, when I was at Raynet selling fiber-to-the-home gear to phone companies, the killer application that the big telcos were going to dominate was Video on Demand. Blockbuster killed that. Then the theme became broader selection (i.e., “The Long Tail”) that was, once again, going to stimulate VOD. Netflix killed that. Then it was going to be time-shifted Situation Comedies on Demand (SCOD?). TiVo killed that.
None of these innovations embodied any great leap in technology. Instead, they represented simple, cheap alternatives from entrepreneurs who used inexpensive storage to undercut the collective bandwidth and processing assumptions of some of the world’s largest corporations and most experienced VCs.
Storage advances march to a staccato beat. And that steady thud -- e.g., improvements in flash or rotating memory -- keeps finding one more way to outstrip its competitors.
Additional bandwidth? It can never arrive faster than we can put up new cell towers, dig up the petunias, or install new boxes on the garage wall. And that’s not very fast. It takes time to dig a trench, erect a tower, or send a guy out to screw some electronics to a wall (not to mention the labor costs involved in all of these).
Additional processing power? It can never arrive faster than it takes to develop the software -- think Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) Vista -- to make it usable. Besides, 10 years ago we could already make MP3 chips powerful enough to play audio, so who cares about more processing power?
But additional storage? Virtually nothing stands in its way. With the introduction of 1-Tbyte perpendicular storage this spring by both Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and Seagate Technology LLC (Nasdaq: STX), the path has opened to 1-Pbyte disks in just a few years.
And while demand goes up, up, up, cost comes down, down, down. The combination of low- and high-tech storage innovation and the volume production stimulated by the avalanche of new storage applications -- like the TiVo and the iPod -- have produced the steepest downward cost curve in all of electronics.
Nor will the cost-cutting stop. Radically new storage technologies on the horizon, to point out just one future vector, promise to supersede current flash memory capabilities by orders of magnitude.
It’s clearly time to alter our collective view of the future. Many of us still focus too much on bigger pipes and faster computers. Yet it’s been clear for a few years that we’ve reached a more-or-less permanent ceiling in transmission speed. And it’s becoming clear that the conventional vision of a central server farm in the sky with a million channels to surf just isn’t going to fly. And “slower and proven” in computer processing chips looks certain to supersede “faster, but more difficult to make.”
But what will replace outmoded visions of the future? A few educated guesses:
Storage will outstrip our senses in the next decade; i.e., we’ll be able to carry around more to view and listen to than we can humanly absorb in a lifetime.
The old “pull” model of communication -- selecting a channel, reaching into a stack of magazines, etc. -- will diminish, while the “push” model expands. How can you pull from a storage device that contains millions of songs? “Push” means that we’ll just subscribe to two or three “channels,” which will customize content to our tastes. Others will recommend a sequence of songs or videos that we might like to watch from the millions on our portable storage. Can you say playlist? Me, I’m going for the 1960s jazz channel coupled with a side helping of Monty Python meets the Marx Brothers. Or do you want to focus on Christian prayer and professional football?
Storage will be increasingly machine-to-machine, even though you will probably be able to program it to accept recommendations from a select group of friends who know, say, that you like a certain type of music.
The communications network (think DSL or cable modem) won’t be very fast, but it won’t need to be, since it will be chugging along 24 hours a day dripping stuff into your storage “tub.” Even at the slowest DSL and cable modem speeds, today’s TiVo could add a high-definition DVD movie, a couple of hours of TV, and many hours of music in a 24-hour period. Day in and day out. Just how much can you watch or listen to after you get home from a hard day at work?
As individuals, we’ll save more and more of our pasts. I already use my computer more for storage than for processing; all my emails for the last 20 years are indexed and searchable. Say, who was that guy I ran into at the reunion four years ago who emailed me saying to look him up the next time I was in Romania? It won’t be long before our computers save, not just the last 100 Internet Websites we’ve visited, but all of them. They will even offer an index function to jog our memories. If I read something interesting about Zimbabwe on a Website four years ago, I’ll know where to look. And what about helmet cams that we might use to record everything from an important meeting to our every step 24 hours a day? You could store everything you’ve done for 15 years in a hard drive the size of a paperback book. As YouTube has demonstrated, the human capacity for infinite narcissism can never be underestimated.
As a civilization, we’ll become increasingly tribal. Even less than they do now, Southern gun enthusiasts won’t see or read anything in common with lesbian liberals or immigrant farm workers. Where will we find common ground for compromise decisions that democracy requires?
Entertainment business model? There’s always been this see-saw tension between the artists and the promoters/programming directors. What happens when everyone becomes an artist (see YouTube) and we’re searching for the programming director who likes 60s jazz and Monty Python like I do? If Hollywood is to protect the legitimate rights of its artists long-term, it will have to totally rethink its business model.
Net neutrality will govern the future Internet infrastructure. I don’t care about the quality of service. And I don’t need a faster pipe. Just hook some slow, clunky, corroded pipe up to my TiVo. I don’t care if it gives me less than a megabit per second when the network is busy and a few megabits per second at four in the morning. My faithful TiVo can just chug away in the background storing it all for me to watch or listen to later. So, based solely on technology trends, at least, it looks as if the net neutrality advocates stand to beat out the big carriers in that political battle.
Trade relations with China and others will be affected. We’ve come to expect that developing countries will break copyright and patent laws early in their growth phase, but eventually give into pressure once they get more established, and follow the example set by their more developed customers. Maybe, however, the Storage Revolution reverses that pattern for copyright, whether for music or software, and the rest of the world could start to follow the Chinese example instead. I wonder what Chairman Mao would have to say about all of this?
My take on it all? The future is not dictated by what the lawyers or the visionaries want. It’s dictated by what the engineers produce. And they have set their sights on a future of nearly infinite, cheap, portable storage. They’ll hit that goal by 2020. Hey, buddy! Wanna buy some storage?
Originally, this post was to be called 'Psst, hey, buddy, wanna buy Sinatra?' or 'Psst, hey, buddy, want to buy Sinatra'. People have asked me where to find this article and I often point them to that title. I'm hoping that by posting it here, they can find it more easily using Google.
I really think that most of the people in this thread and elsewhere have no way to truly grasp the profound impact of an exponential. I know that I can't. Gordon Moore has said on more than one occasion that he can't, either.
Look, let's reiterate what we're talking about. Within a decade that little external hard drive beside your computer that now stores a Terabyte of data will store close to a Petabyte of information, but still cost only $250. That's over 200 million songs. Yes, you read that right, over 200 million five minute long songs. There aren't that many (and probably never will be) different songs (and covers of existing songs) on the planet. Put differently, if you listened to a different song every minute of every day from the day you were born until the day you died at the ripe old age of 100, you still couldn't listen to more than 5% of the collection stored on that hard drive.
Storage has already outstripped one of our five senses - hearing. Today's $250 Terabyte hard drive can store over 200,000 songs. If you listened to two hours of music every night for 25 years, you still wouldn't have heard every song on that hard drive.
There probably aren't more than 200,000 Jazz songs out there. For $250 worth of storage, I could get all the Jazz music ever recorded by mankind. Or, since storage roughly doubles in price performance every 15 months, that $250 worth of storage that stores all the Jazz ever recorded today will cost less than $50 in four years. And a few years after that it will physically shrink to the size of today's USB drives.
Who really believes that copyright laws can possibly hold up under that steamroller? If it only costs $10 for all of the Jazz ever recorded by mankind, what makes any powerful industry lobbying group think that the citizens of this country won't simply repeal or dramatically alter today's copyright laws? Those laws weren't handed down from God to Moses after all.
I'm not advocating anything. I've never stolen a piece of music in my life. My brother is a musician, for cripes sake. But all of the Jazz ever recorded by mankind for $50? Sorry, fellas, I do go 80 miles an hour on the freeway from time to time and I've even been known to park illegally to dash in and pick up my dry cleaning. Oh, and did I mention that I jaywalk shamelessly?
WHEN ALL THE JAZZ EVER RECORDED BY MANKIND COSTS $50, THEN STEALING IT FEELS NO WORSE AN OFFENSE THAN SPEEDING, ILLEGALLY PARKING, OR JAYWALKING! THE LAWS WILL CHANGE TO REFLECT THAT REALITY, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
Finally, I made that prediction about 10Gbps being the 747 of transmission speeds over a decade ago and it has proven to be correct. The people who challenged it above either didn't read the original article or didn't get it. My point was that 10Gbps is likely to be the fastest, broadly deployed TDM rate for a very long time to come. Just like the 747 was the largest commercial airliner for decades. I understand that a fiber may carry a terabit per second. But the fastest TDM stream (and hence the fastest digital electronics) will not exceed 10Gbps. And I get that people are deploying 40Gbps TDM streams today, but they are a tiny fraction compared to 10Gbps and will be for many, many years to come. It's not meant to be a profound point. It's just that 10Gbps is a rate that 'outstrips our senses'. In this case the sense that it has outstripped is our visual cortex. And once you've outstripped the human senses, further progress at the edge takes on a different timbre.
Finally, a number of the posts have entirely missed the point that storage, processing, and communications are on entirely different exponentials. Ten years from now, storage will have improved by 256x, processing will have improved by 32x, but communications to our home will only have improved by about 5x. You need to view these three as horses on a race track. Every time one of the horses laps the other, something profound occurs. The iPod and TiVo have probably changed our lives over the past decade as much as any other technology. They are about storage, not processing or communications. Processing and communications will get their chance again, but not before storage has completed its goal of outstripping our senses.
I don't think
that copyright law will crumble because of cheap mass storage. Right
now content suppliers lose revenues because of illegal copying, but
they're still making nice money. I bet that a lot of artists even don't
mind some level of 'sharing' of their recordings, as it exposes them to
a larger audience who may actually buy their next album or visit a
concert.
Law enforcment is fighting the trade in illegal content, but
only tracks down people who sell illegal copies for a profit. I haven't
heard of anyone getting caught for posession of illegally obtained
content yet, but I don't think it will be very hard to catch a handful
of violators with just a little effort. By the time that illegal
trading grows to such a scale that content suppliers don't get any
revenues anymore, I'm sure it will take only a few average Joes
(including lawyers, CEOs, politicians, ...) being prosecuted for
illegal posession to change the public's attitude towards illegal
content. If there is a sufficient offer of legal content at moderate
prices, people don't want to risk getting convicted for posession of
the 80% of music that they don't listen to anyway.
About the ways
we watch TV, I don't watch many live programs either, and usually I
don't even plan ahead and record stuff on my PVR. Usually I just sit
down and see what's on. Programming on demand works fine for me, but I
don't want to decide yesterday what I want to see today. FTTH is being
deployed on a large scale by major carriers all around the globe, so,
petunias or not, consumers already have a need for more bandwidth than
DSL or cable can offer.
I get your point that there is storage
technology about to be commercialized that will get us orders of
magnitude of improvement, and I agree that this will change current
models of accessing content. I still think that transmission
infrastructure has similar room for growth. Also that eventually both
will hit a ceiling, but I don't share your view that 10G is the 747 of
transmission speeds (or maybe I do, considering that the A380 is on
it's first operational flight as I write this ;->). 10G in the
backbone was fine several years ago, when average access speeds were 1
Mbps or less. When desktops grow to 1 Gbps, backbone speeds have to
grow accordingly, either by TDM, SDM or WDM, that's a moot point, but a
lot more capacity on backbone links will still be needed.
What
I consider to be a break-through in transmission trends is when the
granularity of individual traffic flows is growing to the capacity of a
single wavelength. When a backbone link between two switching nodes
several years ago was 10G, each individual traffic flow was much
smaller, so you had to switch electronically at the packet level in
each node. By the time that individual traffic flows, say the aggregate
traffic from one particular CO in the Boston area to another CO in the
Bay area, grow to 10G sizes, switching at the wavelength level
throughout the backbone suddenly becomes an option. All the optical
startups that were developing true optical switches 8 years ago
(Calient, Innovance, Corvis, Celion, ... just to name a few) were just
way to early since there was no need to switch at the wavelength level
yet. I predict we will get there within a few more years, and that will
radically change the way backbone networks are built.
I agree with what you're saying, but now extrapolate it.
We're within a decade of being able to build an iPod that stores all the music ever recorded by mankind. Really. Ain't exponentials grand?
My point was what do you do then? I can't listen to it all - a lifetime is just not long enough. How do I find stuff that interests me? What 'channel' do I listen to? Who programs the shows for me? How do I pick through the billions of playlists out there. What happens when the whole 'long tail' of music is riding on my hip?
I just can't think of any reference for this in my own life. It's like living at the Library of Congress. What do I read next? Help!
Within a very few years, storage will outstrip our senses. Your iPod will carry more music than your ears could hear in a lifetime. A few years after that it will hold more video than your eyes could see in a lifetime.
The world changed profoundly during the Industrial Revolution with the affordability and ubiquity of machines that outstripped our muscles. The automobile changed our lives and civilizations as profoundly as farming did during the Agricultural Revolution thousands of years ago.
I think we're coming up on that point in the Information Revolution. Everybody thinks its being driven by communications. It certainly is on the wireless side. But everybody seems to be underestimating the tectonic shift that will happen in the middle of the next decade when storage outstrips our senses.
I can't foresee many of the ramifications. Noodling with you good folks helps. Thanks.
Not sure I completely agree with your take on the end of "pulled" media and the advent of "push" where "we subscribe to two or three channels." If that were the case, why isn't XM Radio a bigger success than the iPod or TiVo? Sure I can subscribe to podcasts, or get my DVR to record all the episodes of "Friends," but I'm picking and choosing from my stored media, whether it's a TV show, an audibookor lecture, or Amy Weinstock's latest. I think most consumers realize how easily they can overload their thumb drives or Nano's, and tend to be more selective about what they download (even if they don't consu,e everything they grab), rather than turning it over to XM (or even TiVo's other suggested programming).
Drew -- Excellent and thought-provoking piece, as always. The ability to store and replicate digital content at almost no cost will no doubt have a devastating effect on the shelf-life value of that content. The entertainment industry may have no choice but to shift the emphasis to monetizing brand-new content (and live events), with after-market revenues going away altogether. If or when that happens, mass-market entertainment will have a tough time existing because there simply won't be enough money in it. And without money, the content stream will run ever more shallow. Sounds like an amazingly challenging scenario.
I really do believe that there is a possibility that copyright law will get radically altered within the next decade. I can't think of any time in history when it was so cheap (and so tempting) to make perfect copies of so much information. We're within a stone's throw of having all of the recorded music of mankind on a disk that sells for $100. The associated royalties, on the other hand, are probably measured in the millions of dollars. That big a disconnect just won't hold up. We created the copyright laws and we can modify them, too. But I have no idea who will produce all of the content if we, the audience, are unwilling to subsidize it.
The thing that I just don't know is how many of us really need to watch something in real time. I wrote about this three years ago (see Fiber's Sticky Wicket). In my household, nothing ever gets watched in real time. We rely on TiVo and Netflix. I admit that we're not much into sports or the news, so that may make us more the exception than the rule.
I stand by my argument that 10 Gbps is the 747 of transmission speeds. As a VC I have seen many plans for people carrying 100 Gbps as 10 x 10 Gbps (ala Infinera), but nary a one that calls for a true 100 Gbps single TDM stream. Since dispersion increases as the square of the bandwidth, it's just much easier and cheaper to continue to use 10 Gbps as the ceiling and just multiplex it using lambdas or more fibers.
Up until now, we've seen Ethernet increase its bandwidth every 4 or 5 years by increasing the raw TDM bit rate by an order of magnitude. That order of magnitude increase will slow down (because the desktop won't go beyond 1 Gbps), and it will be achieved through multiplexing somewhere other than in the time domain. I know it seems like an obvious point, but it has a lot of repercussions for the semiconductor and optical industries.
I think none of us can grasp this huge exponential gap that is being created by storage capacity increases. Over the next decade storage price performance will increase by 200 fold while communications will probably only improve by an order of magnitude. That's just too big a disparity to ignore. I see it leading to an era where we leave our slow (10-20 Mbps) communications pipes on 24 hours a day dripping data into a huge storage 'bathtub' (again 24 hours of 10 Mbps is over 100 GB - that's a lot of bandwidth!).
splowman:
You're right. 'Tribal' was a poor choice of words.
All politics is local. I think the 'local' that Tip O'Neill was referring to was geographic as much as anything else.
With the country and planet now wired, 'local' is probably coming to mean point of view more than geography.
People affiliate more by interest than by locale. Gays, guns, and/or green, right? With ever increasing choice in what we read, watch, and listen to, I worry that these groups will fail to find a common forum in which to debate the mundane (but important) issues of the day. The predominance of storage will only aggravate that.
I agree with what you say. But follow the link where I discuss what I mean by a ceiling on transmission speeds.
The basic thesis is that we are starting to max out on the core unit of transmission speed. More pipes? You bet. More colors on a fiber? Sure. Of course you're right about that. But we are unlikely to see a step up from 1 Gbps to the desktop. You just don't need 10 Gbps to your desktop. And we're a long way from 100 Gbps as a single TDM stream at the core of the network. Maybe a decade or more before that goes mainstream (and then only in the network's core). 10 x 10 Gbps ala Infinera? Sure, that makes sense. 10 Gbps is like the 747 of transmission speeds - it will be with us for a l-o-n-g time.
My point is that transmission is hard while storage is easy. Transmission involves digging up petunias. Storage does not. For that reason, the price performance of storage doubles every 14-16 months, while it takes 3-5 years for transmission to double. Over time, the gap between those two exponents is highly disruptive. Storage will soon outstrip our senses.
Storage will keep chuging along while we solve the thorny optical network issues (an industry I spent 20 years of my life helping to build). I think something interesting happens in the next decade, long before we can swap out all the telecom infrastructure and that was what I was trying to get at.
Great article! Your observations about storage are accurate and intriguing. But I must object to the implication that we’ve reached a “more or less permanent ceiling” on Internet transmission speeds.Internet IP traffic is still growing exponentially thanks to ubiquitous broadband penetration and high-bandwidth P2P applications. Global IP traffic is doubling every two years and is projected to grow 600% by the year 2011. (Ref) The problem is that this explosive growth in IP traffic will produce a strain on the Internet core infrastructure as legacy transmission technologies such as SONET and ATM cannot support core speeds in the terabit/second range. Until the telecom carriers migrate toward an optical core network, and optimize IP traffic by moving the IP processing out of the core, bandwidth bottlenecks and latency will affect the quality of service (and the ability of the network to support those mega-BW applications).
Unlimited storage is awesome.But yes, we do need bigger pipes!And those pipes have to be optical to support the anticipated growth in global IP traffic.Unlimited storage won’t help if the backbone networks cannot support unlimited bandwidth.
Interesting viewpoint. If I may summarize: forget FTTH and content delivery networks, we will soon carry around every bit of content ever produced in our wallet/PDA. Seeing that this view is expressed by a leading VC, people may conclude that they should be investing in storage technology rather than communications infrastructure.
Let me give two arguments why I think that big pipes will still be needed, and point out two fallacies in Drew's arguments.
First, it's skipping too lightly over the copyrights management. I'm not sure what Drew implied with the 'dark alley' metaphor, but I don't think that illegal trading of copyrighted content will ever become mainstream. Dumping of large volumes of legal content at discounted prices is something we already see, so $10 for all of Sinatra's recordings, OK. All of the 'I love Lucy' episodes ever recorded free with a box of cereal, OK. But I don't see all of last year's Hollywood movie releases being distributed at similar price levels. You could envision some form of conditional access that restricts access to already downloaded content, so we just download everything and then purchase entitlements. Possible, but administering this will be a challenge, and besides it will be bait for hackers.
The second problem I see is synchronization of multiple copies of the data we access on a daily basis, on our Media Center PCs, our laptops and our PDAs. You'll still need a lot more than a DSL trickle to download all the TV content produced each day around the world, because that's what it boils down to if I want to have access to the local Elbonian news and the latest Icelandic sitcom. The US takes pride in being a nation of immigrants, remember?
The argument that Blockbuster killed VOD is a bit too simplistic. Blockbusters and Netflix only succeeded because at the time they went into business the infrastructure wasn't ready for VOD yet. After the birth of the worldwide web it took 15 years of growth, of people getting used to having access to all this information, of web sites providing more information and applications. People upgraded from dial-up to cable or DSL, and only in recent years there is the infrastructure to reach a critical mass of subscribers ready to receive IPTV or VOD services.
Next, there's the LR article Drew quoted (and wrote!) to illustrate the point that transmission speed has reached a ceiling. This article is of 2003, the middle of the four year fermata, when most of the innovation in the telecom industry was put on hold. Equipment companies couldn't do much more than making their existing devices cheaper, and that was reflected on the OFC exhibition floor.If you look at a couple of recent LR articles, for instance here and here, you read that carriers are now calling for 100 Gig transmission speeds, so you can't argue that 10G transmission is all we'll ever need.
Ultimately all three technologies, storage, processing and transmission, will continue to be pushed forward, and enable new applications and new business models. Sure, I like having access to my entire music collection and all the photos I ever made on my iPod, but I also want to see my local TV news wherever I am. There may be a ceiling, but we're not there yet, and when we get there we'll find there's a ceiling for how much storage we need too.
Some excellent points were made here. I agree with nearly everything
you said. As storage capacity grows by leaps and bounds we will become a
"queuing" society. We will simply line up our chosen media before we
go to bed and start watching/listening when we get home.
One thing I need to disagree with is the idea that we will become more
"tribal" by not being exposed to certain areas of society. In
some respects it would be difficult to have some demographics receive less
exposure to others than they do now. Additionally, in the event someone
needs to talk to someone who is outside of their group the information will
readily be available for contact. The price paid by democracy will be
equal to the one we have now. Politicians will need to pander to enough
groups to get elected, citizens will vote the issues that they care about,
people who don't care will vote whatever they feel at the time, people who
don't vote still won't, and democracy will remain relatively unchanged.
Basically: People who care will find out what they should do based on
research, people who don't care will vote what they've always voted and nothing
will really change...
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