Re: CF and Microprocessors
The key to the Wintel duopoly is the countless billions of lines of code which have been written to this architecture over the years as well as the tens of millions of person-years of training invested in the production, support, and use of this software. While this investment by itself does not preclude Wintel's obsolescence (IBM continues to enjoy an equally, if diminishingly, formidable advantage with its mainframe architecture and software base) it takes many, many years to displace a computing standard like this.
So if one is looking for proprietary systems that have similar potential to Wintel or IBM's mainframes one needs to look at the factors which provide the "lock in". In the case of CF, it is difficult to draw direct comparisons because there are few, if any, "applications" written for CF and no investment in "user training". CF, like all storage, is a black box as far as the user is concerned: it's only attributes are price and capacity. Similarly, while the OS provides support for CF, it is just another removable storage device as far as programs are concerned and it has no "APIs" of its own that can provide a technological "hook" to ensnare the software writer.
Given that storage is ultimately a commodity, one has to look further up the food chain to find the potential for serious proprietary value. For example, EMC has managed to build an empire by taking commodity building blocks (disk drives) and packaging them into Storage Systems which allow businesses not just to store but to manage their ever-growing mountains of business-critical information. Again, it is the software that gives EMC its edge.
So when looking at the CF opportunity, I would look for companies that have unique software or other capabilities that leverages CF to add value. For example, Data-Disk Technology, Inc. (http://www.datadisk.com) provides both software as well as physical encapsulation technology to provide highly ruggedized "digital dog tags" which can be used to record medical and other personal information. |
