December 13, 2009

In today’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman coins a useful new term: The Great Inflection. It describes what happens when devices and web services become increasingly cheap and available:

In case you haven’t noticed, the U.S. economy today is actually being hit by two tsunamis at once: The Great Recession and the Great Inflection. The Great Inflection is the mass diffusion of low-cost, high-powered innovation technologies — from hand-held computers to Web sites that offer any imaginable service — plus cheap connectivity. They are transforming how business is done. The Great Recession you know.

Even as we slog through the worst economic conditions in 70 years, information technology marches on. Every 18 months, processing speed, storage, and memory doubles, bandwidth increases by 50%, prices drop. Faster, better, cheaper. Every year, so many millions more are on the web. Now with the dawning of pervasive computing — the internet everywhere — we are not only changing how we do business, as Friedman would have it, but also how we interact with each other.

By Marshall Brown | Permalink | Comments (0) |