There's Plenty of Room in the Future

• The complexity for minimum component costs in the semiconductor industry increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year and a half (Moore's Law). This drove up CPU speed, RAM size, GPU power, etc.
• Hard disk storage for a given cost increased by a factor of two every 9-12 months

Geometric growth in CPU power and disk space drove the PC revolution. Big winners -- Intel, Seagate, Microsoft, others...

In the last five to ten years, it became obvious that other predictable factors were at play:

• Modem speeds doubled every 21 months, up until the point where they made the jump to broadband
• Optical communications bandwidth doubled to tripled every year
• LAN bandwidth increased 10x every two to three years

Geometric growth in modem speeds, LAN networking, and optics drove the Internet revolution. Big winners -- Yahoo! Ebay, Google, others...

In the last three-five years, yet more steadily advancing technical trends have come into play:

• Internet traffic continues to double every year for the forseeable future
• CMOS image sensors are doubling in density every 18 months
• Liquid Crystal Displays and Liquid Crystal on Silicon are increasing panel size and density, roughly doubling every two to three years
• Solid-state non-volatile memory is doubling in capacity every 18 months
• Improved power management and new batteries are increasing effective battery life by about 20-30% every year
• Wireless networks are doubling in capacity every 18 months

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to come up with all of the outlandish possibilities possible in a decade (i.e., 20 Megapixel shoulder-mounted video cameras recording our entire lives and transmitting them wirelessly to millions of live video blogs). One thing's for sure, though -- the pace of change continues to pick up, and Silicon Valley shows no sign of running out of steam. There's plenty of room in the future for new technology companies.