A shift is beginning from the traditional mechanical, spinning disk magnetic media (aka Hard Drive) to solid-state flash memory for mass storage.  There are some serious advantages to using flash memory including performance, power consumption, weight and size.

These are the same memory chips that are in your cell phones, iPOD’s (non-HDD types) and cameras.  Whats changed is the manufactures have gotten better at making them and there are more plants to manufacture the chips.  The hardware manufactures have also gotten on board and are making money selling flash hard drives, so the price is going down (although it is still about 20x more expensive per GB).  These drives are not a fairly standard option for most business class systems for around $200-$500 more.

This will be a big change for the industry and its just starting now.

Karl Weir

Director of Consulting, Globalquest Solutions Inc.

By now you have probably heard about Amazon’s new Kindle 2, the electronic book reader.  It’s a fascinating little device with built in G3 wireless and an amazing display specially designed for reading books on the device.  Personally I don’t know anyone who owns one, but in my travels I’ve seen people using the devices in airports.

This may be one of those paradoxical shifts in progress that no one will really notice, until  your newspaper decides to no longer print your daily paper, but rather to deliver it to you on a device like a Kindle.  The thought here is simple.  Electrons are cheap, paper, printing presses, ink, distribution and scrap is expensive.  There are some newspapers and publishers out there now are now actively considering delivering their ‘news’ only electronically.  It could represent a huge saving to them and keep their paper in business.  After all a newspapers job really is to report on the news, not necessarily run printing presses.

If you look forward, the day may not be far off when our kids will no longer have those 2 inch thick books to lug around in their backpacks. It may be devices like the Kindle and they have all their books for school and recreational reading on the device.  We have already seen the shift in the technological world from big, thick manuals to either on-line or PDF’s delivered on a CD.  (When was the last time you saw the printed manual for Microsoft Word delivered in the package?).

The death of paper.  Saving a tree.  Hay, electrons are cheap.

Karl Weir

Director of Consulting, Globalquest Solutions Inc.