Cheap disk space has its downsides: May 28, 2001 issue of New Thinking

May 28, 2001 New Thinking:
Cheap disk space has its downsides

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May 28, 2001

Cheap disk space has its downsides

By Gerry McGovern

Cheap computer disk space allows for the economic storage of content. However, it also encourages bad habits in relation to how content is managed. Because the ‘price’ you pay for storing that extra document is so low there is little incentive to examine whether that document is worth storing in the first place. This is not a good thing, in that it feeds information overload – probably the most critical problem the information economy faces.

‘How much information,’ a study carried out in 2000 by the University of California, had, among other things, some interesting charts. One showed the explosive growth in disk capacity sold, while another showed an equally dramatic drop in price per megabyte of capacity. NASDAQ slump or not, there has been no downturn in the disk storage marketplace. That’s because the amount of data created in a great many organizations is doubling – and moving to a point of trebling – every year.

The consequences are real and growing. An A.T. Kearney study entitled ‘Network Publishing’, which was released in April 2001, stated that: “Lack of efficient publishing capabilities for digital content costs organizations $750 billion annually due to wasted time spent by knowledge workers seeking and capturing information necessary for them to do their jobs.”

It’s a bit like the big cars needing an oil crisis before they got smaller. Only with disk storage it’s unlikely we’ll see an oil crisis; a point where the price of storage suddenly doubles or trebles. It mightn’t be a bad thing if it happened, though. It might teach all of us to be more ‘environmentally conscious’ with regard to how we create and store our content.

On a recent trip to Britain, I picked up The Guardian newspaper. In it there was an ad for The Guardian website. The ad said: “Isn’t it amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.” I thought about it and shivered a little. The newspaper I held in my hand was manageable. In its pages was a reasonable amount of content that could be read in a reasonable period of time.

The ad was telling me that the website held much more content with much greater detail on all the topics covered in the newspaper. Part of me was thankful, but part of me just didn’t want to know. Though I have become a total information junkie I have this permanent data migraine. It’s like by the time I’ve finished reading one page, some 10,000 more have appeared on that vast and every expanding Web. It’s like running faster up a cliff. You know that at some point you will stop, exhausted, and then fall with a crunch to the ground.

We badly need an ‘oil crisis’ to change the way we deal with and think about content. We need to stress quality over quantity. We need to let people know that it’s good to delete; that not everything should be saved just because there’s lots of disk space to save it on. Cheap disk storage and the Web provide all this wonderful potential for the economic publishing of content. But as Neil Young once sang: “The thing that makes you strong can kill you in the end.”

Gerry McGovern

Related Links
University of California study
A.T. Kearney report

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"Lack of efficient publishing capabilities for digital content costs organizations $750 billion annually."

We badly need an ‘oil crisis’ to change the way we deal with and think about content.