Always Coming, Never Here

These are the three most critical things for the future of personal computing. Why? Because the next thing coming down the pipe is massive, massive processing power. Which is great! We can keep bending Moore's Law over all day long, and make humongous irons available in people's living rooms and offices. We can do all kinds of great calculations... but what are we going to do with all this calculating power?

People will tell you that the possibilities are limitless - with huge data sets, you'll be able to figure out amazing things and make predictions and perform calculations previously only available to giant enterprise computing teams. But here's the root problem: you can crunch data all day long, but where are you going to get the data from? Well, unfortunately, you're going to spend all day downloading that data from the "wonderful" intarweb0rs. Bandwidth is going to become a huge problem; you're going to have this awesome computing monster at your feet, but have nothing to feed it!

People are going to want to keep massive databases locally so they can do cool computing tasks - so storage is a key thing, but thankfully terabytes aren't that expensive any more. I'm sure we'll see 1TB drives as standard shipping options by next year, if not the end of this year. And the advent of solid state storage will also make accessing data faster, so that's awesome too. The only piece missing from this equation is faster networks! Sadly, the computer network infrastructure of the U.S.A. is pretty pathetic when compared internationally. If our country has any hope of competing, we need to get on the stick and dismantle the network monopolies, institute real competition, and get innovating!