Kryder, Moore, and You
(Originally posted March 10, 2010)
As the world of computer and computing powers develop, they are bound by two laws that are working against your productivity. These laws allow you to save and have access to every email you ever send and every file you ever create, while eliminating the need to delete anything. The first is Moore’s law and the se cond is Kryder’s law.
Moore’s law is concerned with hardware and processing power while Kryder’s law addresses storage issues. Together they predict the continual growth and development of computers.
What does this mean for you? In the very near future – within the next few years even – the digital landscape, be it a personal computers or cloud computing, may offer more processing power and storage than most single users could possibly ever use.
In 1965 Intel’s cofounder, Gordon Moore, published a paper stating that the number of transistors that can be placed on a circuit doubles every two years. There is no upper limit to Moore’s law – the number of transistors on a circuit will never cease to increase. Since 1965 Moore’s observation has proven absolutely true.
Years later came a hard drive heavy weight, Mark Kryder, who fathered his own law. Kryder’s law is like a rocket car to Moore’s horse and buggy. Mark Kryder is credited as providing the impetus for the amazing 1,000-fold increase in hard drive space over the past 15 years, easily deserving the honor of being Kryder’s law’s namesake. Kryder’s law explains the continual growth in storage bits on a hard drive. His goal is to affordably get a terabyte worth of storage on a single square-inch magnet hard drive.
Together, these two laws describe the upward trajectory of computing power and storage. The problem is that as storage becomes larger and cheaper, we are presented with less incentive to stay organized and encouraged – a la Gmail – to never delete anything ever again. You might already find yourself holding on to files and emails you never would have kept even 3 years ago, just because you can.
As computers and servers become archives for everything you’ve ever done on a computer, we’re faced with increased challenges to find everything. We download attachments to different folders, accidentally save things in the wrong place, and spend more time than it’s worth tracking down rogue files in the endless warehouse that our computers have become.
It is important to create a digital business environment that is accessible not only to a single user, but also to any users that might be brought on in the future. When making your decision to store data locally, on a server, or in the cloud, consider how easy it will be to find a single item in a vast data system. This is a key consideration especially if you work with a number of people, collaborating using the same files and information, as more and more information will amass on your hard drives very quickly.
The question is: With everything at your fingertips, will your work flow slow you down?
