Also residential real estate. Very important, ask any realtor about closets.
Or ask George Carlin.
From EE Times:
The biggest obstacle to the promise of technologies such as AI and machine learning isn't the power of computers or the sophistication of algorithms, but rather the fundamental economics of cloud data storage.
At the turn of the twentieth century, 98%of all factories were powered by water wheels or reciprocating steam engines. The other 2% were just starting to experiment with a radically new form of power—electricity. These new factories were role models for the future, creating a sea change in the economics of manufacturing. They could outperform and out-produce their peers.
However, electric power was dangerous, complicated, and unreliable. It required the retooling of factories and dedicated resources, staff, facilities, time, and money. In addition, companies had to build enough capacity to power their operations at peak loads even though they typically needed far less power in the normal course of operations. At around the same time, the first power plants capable of delivering AC power over large distances began to emerge as both Edison and Westinghouse built centralized electric utilities.
What’s often lost in the telling of the story is that the delivery of electric power as a utility did much more than reduce costs, it spurred a flurry of innovation and new business models by allowing businesses to focus on what they were best at, their products and services. Many of the cornerstone industries of the early 1900s, such as automotive and home appliances, would have been impossible to scale up without the advent of the economies of scale in the electric utility industry.
Just as electricity powered the industrial revolution in the 20th century, data storage is powering today's most valuable companies -- companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
Even companies that make durable goods, like Tesla, could not exist without an enormous quantity of data. And just as electric power generation migrated to centralized power plants, the storage of data is moving from on-premises storage to large centralized-clouds....MORE
