Future Technology Trends

Information technology is a field in which innovation is constant and relentless, as we have moved over the last 100 years through mechanical, electromechanical, vacuum tube and discrete transistor to the integrated circuit of the current paradigm. Moore's Law offers the most widely recognized evidence of the growth rate of technology; in 1965 Intel's Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors per integrated circuit would double every couple of years. Moore forecast that this would continue until at least 1975; in fact it has continued through to today. Storage density offers another example of this trend; mobile hard disk drive densities have shown growth rates of 100 per cent per year. There are obstacles to this relentless progress however; Moore's Law has relied on a manufacturing technique called scaling in order to shrink transistors, but we are now approaching the limits of scaling, as key transistor components such as the gate insulator are reaching physical limits. Components are approaching atomic layers of thickness; further shrinking would degrade performance. The history of technology indicates, however, that as each generation of technology reaches its limits, new breakthroughs are discovered.

This constant technology innovation has exerted a strong pressure on the costs of physical assets, yet IT spending by businesses continues to grow. This paradox is rooted in two key factors. First, the physical cost of assets accounts for a falling proportion of businesses' IT costs; IBM research indicates that the labour cost of supporting storage systems is approaching three times the hardware cost. Indirect costs such as helping colleagues informally can account for 60 per cent of the total cost of ownership for PCs.