From Parsimony to Bounty (and Back Again)

I have this week off, and one of the chores I'm doing is that I'm ripping all my old Elvis Costello CDs to MP3s. When I first got iTunes, I did this for selected tracks off each album--I knew I had only (only!) 20 gigs or so to hold my music. But now, with a new 160g MacBook Pro and an 80g iPod...well, I no longer only have to have just some of my collection. I can pretty much have every album I've ever owned and then some. And then double that again.

It's odd how behavior changes when one constraint (in this case, memory storage) vanishes. What was once a precious commodity becomes cheap and available, and all of a sudden, people act differently. We've seen this time and time again with computers of course, as processor speed and memory become faster and larger, but it also happens all the time away from the digital as well. Economists have known this for some time, of course, with behavioral finance. You can observe it in both small and big gestures. Despite the warnings, I used to top off my car's gas tank at the pump. Once gas hit $2.50 a gallon in the US, I stopped doing that little gesture. It also, on a large scale, stopped many from taking car and plane trips.

At MX last week, Adam Richardson talked about constraints using the metaphor of walls: some are load-bearing and cannot be moved; others are for decoration. I'd like to add that, over time, some walls can change from load-bearing to decoration (like my hard drive's memory) and visa versa (gasoline, once cheap, is now an impediment).

Originally posted at Wednesday, February 21, 2007 | Comments (1) | Trackback (0)