What Would Your Business Look Like if the Key Constraint Became "Free?"

Though it might at one point have seemed ludicrous to imagine building a business on the backs of an assumption that computing hardware or bandwidth would someday be essentially "free," that has been a fundamental precondition for businesses ranging from Microsoft to Netflix to Google.

Computing power, alone, does not define the present, or the future. But it is helpful to remember that overcoming "impossible" business conditions can be imagined, and can be used to build huge new businesses.

Moore's Law allowed a young Bill Gates to imaging what his software business would look like if "hardware were free." Netflix assumed something similar would happen with consumer bandwidth, allowing Netflix to build a business of streaming entertainment video.

These days, other companies, including Netflix, have looked at Moore's Law and tried to imagine what their businesses would look like if "bandwidth were free." The point, by the way, is not that the inputs actually are "free," only that the inputs stop being barriers.

Smart engineers once believed it was "impossible to squeeze all the information contained in today's high-definition TV signal into just six megahertz of bandwidth. It once was thought impossible to load 40 channels of standard-definition video onto an analog laser. None of those feats are unusual today.

The point is that, at least where Moore's Law can be brought to bear, business leaders need to envision what is possible if some currently expensive barrier disappears.

The first semiconductor devices appeared 42 years ago. If we compare the evolution rate of the chip to that of the earwig, we get a ratio of 0.0000000097:1. That is, for every year it took to evolve the bug, it took a ninety seven hundred billionth of a year to evolve its electronic intelligence partner. If this rate continues, we’ll see chips as intelligent as we are within a decade, by 2023.

What would a world where devices are as smart as we are look like? It is impossible to envision any more than our great-grandparents could foresee the impact of plastics, automobiles, or airplanes. We are chained to the attitudes and realities of our past. Psychologists tell us that less than 1 person in 10,000 can foresee a future that’s very different than at present.