Ok, not disappearing in terms of going away, but they are becoming more invisible, especially when you consider how Gen Y / Millennials use technology.
Just watch this great video that Accenture put together where they talk to the “experts” and get a feel for how Millennials will shape technology around the cloud. The theme throughout the video is this access to information and content anytime, anywhere (like we haven’t heard that before), and that ultimate freedom is only possible with the cloud. And Millennials’ windows into the cloud? Smartphones (or some variation in the future). Desktop and Laptop PCs running operating systems like Windows 7 or Mac OSX, with 1TB hard drives and loads of expensive software are already becoming overkill for some consumers. Heck, tablets may even be “old-school” in 5-10 years.
I must be getting old, because I already tell my millennial kids, “when I was your age, we didn’t have smartphones. We had to walk around to find a phone bolted to the ground, with big bulky 2000 page yellow books hanging from them where you had flip the pages to find a phone number. And there was no texting. We had paper and pencils, and not those mechanical kind, ones where you had to turn a crank to sharpen. And we had envelopes with stamps….” You get the drift.
To a storage guy like myself who has lived hard drives for the past 15 years, I have to think kids are already asking “what’s a hard drive?” Because for many, odds are, not a single device they own will have one. Instead there will be billions of them spinning in the cloud, invisible to the user, cranking out the content of their choice.
I can already hear myself…”When I was your age, we had hard drives in what we called computers that had to be backed up, and sometimes they got full, and we had to delete stuff, or buy a new one…and they weighed a pound and were bigger than your phone…”
What are you already telling your kids? Or, what are you already hearing from your parents?
“When I was your age___________________”
Check it out:
image from: http://www.techi.com/2011/01/verizon-iphone/
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