I doesn't much matter if the PC's are high end or sub-$1000. As much as I dislike Microsoft's approach to things, they are good for the sales of disk drives. Server centric computing will continue to grow, supporting the light client and massive storage at the server. But even with that, users, especially home users, will not give up local storage. Has anybody on this thread had a home machine for over a year that hasn't had to add storage?
Apps get better and bigger! Anyone that has added/upgradded MS Office, migrated from Win 3.x to Win95, or added any of the many new apps out there has seen first hand how fast the space gets munched up. Users won't readily give up this local storage either. Looking into NC's at a recent Oracle conference, even know I like this approach in the business environment, there was a great sense of frustration from people that they would be giving up all local storage.
On the high end, anybody who has attended any of the many computing conferences out there recently has been hearing more about massive data warehouses, data marts, OLAP, OLTP apps of sizes never considered before, and so on. Not only do these require computing horsepower, but mass storage.
I don't think the question is "Will there be growth in the requirement for storage?", but rather "Can SEG be and efficient producer?". |
