Adventures In Utility Computing

The business of utility computing.

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Atoms to Bits

In 1995 Nicholas Negroponte published Being Digital. The main premise of the book is the shift in our economy from one based upon Atoms to one based upon Bits.

He starts the book with a story about being asked to declare the value of his laptop computer to the security guard at a major corporation. He said "Roughly, between $1M and $2M". The security guard said that could not be true and placed a value on the property pass of $2,000. Of course this represents the value of the computer but not the value of the information that resides on the computer.

Fast forward to today. The shift from Atoms to Bits is transforming business models. The winners will be those companies that see this transformation and implement the infrastructure and business models that moves customers in this direction. A few examples are newspapers like the Boston Globe and the New York Times, developing pictures using Shutterfly and buying music from the iTunes Music Store.

In future entries I will discuss the trends driving this transformation and the business models and products already moving from atoms to bits.

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