Digital Life
Understanding Second-order Effects
Throughout modern history, technological breakthroughs surpass the people who invent them. The gap between the potential and the humanly possible, the chief by-product of the Law of Disruption, inevitably leads to dramatic change in the short term. But the real transformation comes later, as human systems—economic, social, legal—struggle to catch up. This chapter introduces the Law of Disruption and its key drivers, Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law. Together, they have built the foundation for our new existence, our digital life. Now comes the hard part: creating a new body of laws to regulate it, to keep the peace, and to ensure its prosperity.
Killer apps in the middle ages
Disruptive Technologies change the world. But not in the way you might think.
In the darkest days of the Middle Ages, a Germanic king adapted the rigid metal stirrups used in Asia, making them instead from flexible leather. Now soldiers could balance themselves on horceback and still fight, making them far more effective. The stirrup saved Europe, and these new mounted cavalry were celebrated forever after as knights. But that’s just the beginning of the story. To maintain the new fighting force, knights needed a source of income. Rather than pay them himself, the king granted the knights the right to collect rents and other tributes from farmers in their domain. Feudalism, landed nobles, and serfdom were born. More knights required more land, and the king began to take it from the church. Church and state, and the rise of the latter, established a long-lasting pattern of interaction.
The first-order effects of the stirrup were dramatic. Medieval society was saved. The Catholic Church survived and continued to provide social, cultural, and legal continuity with the long-dead Roman Empire. The king emerged as the first leader of a new and powerful empire, the forerunner of modern Europe. On Christmas Day in the year of 800, he took the crown from Pope Leo III’s hands as the pontiff was about to coronate him, and placed it on his own head. His name was Charlemagne—Charles Magnus, the Great—emperor of the Romans.
The long-term consequences of Charlemagne’s simple innovation were, in some sense, even more stunning. The social, economic, and legal systems that developed to support the mounted troops persisted for nearly a thousand years, long after the actual advantage of the stirrup had been neutralized. Charlemagne’s empire, in some form, lasted until the age of Napoleon. Even today, you still can’t buy property in parts of central London without paying tribute to the Duke of Westminister.
The stirrup is a classic example of what I describe ten years ago as a killer application, or “killer app”—a technological innovation whose introduction disrupts long-standing rules of markets or even whole societies. Killer apps establish new industries and transform existing ones. They can even create new empires. Their own inventors may have little idea of the uses for them that people will ultimately discover. And the real impact is often felt long after their introduction. The stirrup, crop rotation, reading glasses, iron rope, the steam engine, railroads, the telegraph, antibiotics, automobiles, the atom bomb, the semiconductor—this is just a short list of inventios whose dramatic introductions were followed by even more dramatic changes to the civilizations that used them.
Saying that the stirrup created medieval Europe is a stretch, but not a big one. As historian Lynn White Jr. put it, “few inventions have been so simple as the stirrup, but few have had so catalytic an influence on history.”
The three laws of digital life
Charlemagne had the stirup. We have the computer.
The information age, like the feudal age, began with a simple innovation. On November 6,1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president of the United States in a rout. Although Eisenhower was expected to defeat Adlai Stevenson, no one imagined so lopsided a victory. No one, that is, except a Census Bureau computer named Univac. Univac had been built to tally the census, but its operators programmed it instead to process election results. After only I percent of the vote had been counted, Univac correctly predicted an Eisenhower landslide.
Univac weighed 16,000 pounds, performed about 1000 calculations per second, and cost $750,000. it was the first commercially sold computer in the world, and the first to be used for business applications (General Electric programmed it to calculate its payroll in 1954). It was also the first to be programmed for a task it was not initially designed to perform—a trend that defines modern computing to this day. The Census Bureau’s machine was the first; by 1957, forty-six had sold.
Nearly sixty years after Eisenhower’s election, there are now more computing devices in the world than there are people, and their numbers are doubling every few years. The semiconductor, or “chip,” was first added to a calculator in 1967, to a toy in 1978, and to a toaster in 1983. A personal computer was first marketed in the early 1980s. Despite unfathomable advances in the computer’s power and abilities, the price of computing has dropped steadily for thirty years. Today’s PC costs 16 percent of what it did in 1981, but is nearly five hundred times more powerful. More than a billion have been sold.
As chips have become cheaper and more prevalent, their impact has moved from the world of computers and high technology to every aspect of modern life. Computers are the central driver of productivity gains across industries. Softwear has become a key source of new consumer products and services. The average automobile now has more than one hundred microprocessors and its own operating system. Even product packaging is becoming intelligent. Soon, more than a trillion items will be able to send and receive data about their price, whereabouts, and expiration dates.
The ubiquity of computers in business, however, has been eclipsed by their takeover of our personal lives. As e-mail and Web browsing have given way to virtual reality games, intelligent call phones, and social networking, we are each developing a second, parallel, existence. Human beings thrive on interaction, and computers have given us remarkable new tools to connect, collaborate, and communicate with one another. In 2008, consumer Internet usage surpassed business use for the first time, opening a gap that is expected to widen over the next decade. We have our real lives, and now we also have digital lives.
In our digital lives, we can simultaneously chat with friends in different time zones or explore alternative identities in role-playing games. We can let our computers scour the internet looking for things that interest us – auctions for obscure collectibles, music by artist liked by people who like the same books as you do, or just random content (blogs, photo images, YouTube videos) fed into our personal home pages. And we are no longer tethered by wired connections. All of our information is now available wherever we go on a variety of devices. Nearly 20 percent of American homes had dropped landline services by 2009, relying entirely on cell phones. “Computing,” as Nicholas Negroponte wrote in his 1995 classic, Being Digital, “”is not about computers anymore. It is about living.”
Digital life is the unintended side effect of cheap computing power and the ubiquitous network standards known as the Internet. Initially invented in the 1970s, the Internet had the modest goal of connecting the mainframe computers of U.S. government agencies and defense contractors. As more computers joined the network, however, the Internet mutated into something far different and much more interesting. Today, it connects billions of devices and billions of people. It moves information at ever-increasing speeds along a nearly infinite set of pathways, shortening distances and eliminating borders.
Three related principles – Moore’s Law, Metcalfe’s Law, and the Law of Disruption – explain the power and promise of digital life. Taken together, they provide its natural laws – its physics – overseeing its unique forms of time, space, and gravity.
Moore’s Law: Faster, Cheaper, Smaller
In 1965, Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, made an astonishing prediction. In a brief article titled “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” he claimed that the number of transistors on his chips would double every year or two without increasing their cost to users. His promise is now known as Moore’s Law: every twelve to eighteen months, the processing power of computers doubles while price holds constant.
Moore’s Law is the result of technological breakthroughs that reduce the size of transistors, couples with manufacturing improvements that greatly reduce the frequency of defects. With each new generation, producers yield slightly larger chips made with slightly smaller transistors. Neither Moore nor his competitors have yet to break Moore’s Law, and there is every reason to believe they will continue to deliver it for the rest of our working lives.
The application of Moore’s Law boils down to one remarkable fact: computers continue to get faster, cheaper, and smaller. As a result, they become more powerful by a factor of two with every succeeding generation. Computer memory, data storage, and data communications have their own rough approximations of Moore’s Law. Improvements in fiber-optic cables (which transmit data at the speed of light) and the development of optical switches translate to data communications costs that are rapidly approaching zero from most uses. One fiber-optic cable can carry millions of simultaneous telephone calls.
Total data storage has also expanded exponentially. In 1980, IBM sold refrigerator-sized disks for its mainframe computers that stored about 1.2 gigabytes of data at a cost of $200,000. Today, Wal-Mart sells 4-gigabyte drives — enough to store about 3,000 books — that are the size of a paper clip and cost only $5.00. GE announced in early 2009 a breakthrough that will increase the store capacity of CDs by 100,000 percent. IBM is working on technology that will store data in individual atoms and build circuits out of a single molecule.
Because chips are the raw material in the construction of digital life, the implications of the faster-cheaper-smaller principle are profound. Consider a few examples:
1. deflation. Basic commodities like oil, electricity, or cotton tend to become more expensive over time, with cost increases working their way through the rest of the system. Computer prices, on the other hand, have stayed the same, or gone down. Miniaturization leads to computers in more and more products, increasing economies of scale and pulsing costs down even faster.
2. abundant resources. Oil, natural gas, coal, and many of the sources of electricity are nonrenewable – as they are used, they are also used up, raising prices and limiting further increases in productivity. But the major ingredient of semiconductors is silicon, the second-most abundant element on earth.
以上内容摘自：Laws of Disruption: Harnessing the New Forces that Govern Life and Business in the Digital Age 一书，作者：Larry Downs
Posted by 1204068273
@ 10:10 AM CST
Country with most millionaires next door is...?
http://business.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/01/where-are-the-most-millionaires-next-door/?hpt=C1
(CNN) – Pop quiz: Which country hosts the world's highest concentration of millionaires?
A) The United States
B) Switzerland
C) Singapore
D) Qatar
The answer is C) Singapore. A whopping 15.5% of Singapore households had more than $1 million in assets in 2010, according to a study out by the Boston Consulting Group. You are more likely to bump into a millionaire in Singapore than anywhere else in the world. Runner-up Switzerland doesn’t even come close, with less than 10% millionaire households.
Singapore’s millionaire population is also growing – and fast. The city-state had nearly a third more millionaires in 2010 than a year earlier, the swiftest increase of any country.
Singapore’s rapid GDP growth – 14.7% last year – and the solid appreciation of its currency have driven the millionaire boom. Analysis shows Singapore has had strong growth in financial services, tourism and exports in 2010.
Singaporeans have ridden the wave of increasing wealth throughout Asia. “Singapore is more plugged into wealth creation than any other nation,” says Mykolas Rambus, CEO of intelligence provider Wealth-X . He adds that Singaporeans are not just benefiting from China’s phenomenal growth, but also that of India and Southeast Asia. Boston Consulting Group’s study found wealth in Asia ex-Japan grew the fastest of any region in 2010, increasing more than 17%.
Policy also plays a role in Singapore’s wealth, with the city-state boasting low taxes, efficient regulation and high rating for quality of life. The Heritage Foundation, a Conservative think tank, ranked Singapore the second freest economy in the world in 2010, citing its pro-business credentials. One example from Heritage: “Starting a business takes only three days, compared to the world average of 34 days.”
Like many other nations, Singapore is facing a growing wealth gap. The Gini coefficient, a commonly used measure of income inequality, has risen steadily over the last decade and the issue struck a chord with the public during recent elections.
Tan Ern Sur, Associate professor of sociology at the National University of Singapore, believes neither the rich nor the poor are very visible in Singapore. “We also do not have a strong politics of envy, perhaps because Singapore is largely a middle-class society,” he says by e-mail. People are more concerned with their own financial pressures than with overall wealth concentration.
It may also help ease concerns that Singapore only ranked tenth in the concentration “ultra-high-net-worth,” households, those with more than $100 million in assets. According to BCG, the highest proportion of the super rich is in Saudi Arabia, with 18 per 100,000 households.
Proportion of millionaire household by market
1. Singapore 15.5%
2. Switzerland 9.9%
3. Qatar 8.9%
4. Hong Kong 8.7%
5. Kuwait 8.5%
6. UAE 5%
7. United States 4.5%
8. Taiwan 3.5%
9. Israel 3.4%
10. Belgium 3.1%
11. Japan 3%
12. Bahrain 2.6%
13. Ireland 2.3%
14. Netherlands 2.3%
15. UK 2.2%
Source: BCG Global Wealth
Posted by 1204068273
@ 10:04 AM CST
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