Society will soon have the first billion-instructions-per-second PCs (equivalent to the supercomputers of a decade ago). In ten years it will be 100 billion instructions per second. In 2000 one gigabyte of storage can be bought for US$ 10. In a decade a terabyte (1,000 Gb) will cost that same amount. That is enough to store 3,000 books or 300 films. It will be possible to develop an on-line library of the world's books (around 100 million) and create archives of the written word. Processing power will be needed to read, summarize and order the information.
The power and storage capacities will change the way we learn, work and entertain ourselves.
As networked computing develops, business should assume that computing and storage will be free. The cost will not be in the hardware but in the maintenance of the data.