Recently I have been reading articles on Apple vs. MSN and the downloadable music wars. More interesting (at least to me) than who will win this battle is what it all means. In the last 25-30 years (one generation), we have gone from phonograph records to half inch square memory chips (which now, by the way, come in gigabyte sizes). Let's look at the trends here:

Music goes from tape, to optical (CD), to bits. Does anyone doubt that video will go down the same path?

Displays go from CRTs at 640x480 to flat screens at 1280x1024.

Why is a music DVD more appealing than it's companion CD? Part of it is the video, but the DVD also has 3-4 times the audio density. The music sounds better because it is better.

Ok. So what does this all mean?

If it were me, I wouldn't buy Blockbuster stock or glass company stock (although Corning is a player in flat screen technology as well). I figure that in the next 2 years I'll have all my music as bits and the CDs will be in the bottom of some closet. How long before my movies get there?

Well... Hitachi now sells a 400 gig hard drive. That's about 100 movies, which is more than I have. But the key for movies is still bandwidth. We are now at the point (just this year) where more than half of all the homes that have Internet connectivity have high-speed Internet. The problem with Movies is that we don't yet have the right software and appliances (something we're working on a bit...). Give it another couple of years.

Oh, by the way, did you know you can produce a pretty good display using laser interference patterns... something to think about!

Friday, September 10, 2004 3:41:45 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Observations