Steve Waite quotes from George Gilder’s new book “The Silicon Eye.”
Like the railroads that bankrupted a previous generation of visionary entrepreneurs and built the foundations of an industrial nation, fiber-optic webs, storewidth breakthroughs, data centers, and wireless systems installed over the last five years will enable and endow the next generation of entrepreneurial wealth. As Mead states, ‘the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life was to get a company going during the bubble. Now, Mead says, there’s space available; you can get fab runs; you can get vendors to answer the phone. You can make deals with people; you can sit down and they don’t spend their whole time telling you how they’re a hundred times smarter than you. It’s absolutely amazing. You can actually get work done now, which means what’s happening now is that the entrepreneurs, the technologists, are building the next generation technology that isn’t visible yet but upon which will be built the biggest expansion of productivity the world has ever seen.’
Some more quotes by Gilder in a Business Week blog:
Forget the telecosm. Get ready for the “planetary sensorium.”
By that, Gilder means a world dotted with billions of interconnected imaging sensors and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. A camera chip in every dark alley. An RFID tag on every piece of merchandise. Data whizzing around the globe to be correlated with other data. No crime unseen. No movement of goods undetected.
Gilder believes ubiquitous chip-dom is about to materialize because of changes in the economics of the semiconductor business. “The old semiconductor industry was based on abundant power,” he says. “Now, we’re in an environment where power is the key scarcity. Every performance metric is governed by watts it consumes. It’s not bit per second. It’s bit per second per watt for everything.”
According to this new paradigm, RFID chips are “more powerful than a Pentium,” Gilder declares. Whereas the Pentium uses about 80 watts, an RFID chip uses microwatts to power a processor, memory, and radio transmissions. That’s quite a feat in a world where low power consumption determines value.
