2007 - Predictions from Anderson

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2073635,00.asp

• Flash Chips: "This will be the year of flash wars," Anderson said. "There are seventeen different fabs coming online and they are mostly NAND flash chips. Get ready for flash computers. Anything that is a computer will be a flash computer. Samsung is bragging that you can have a computer without a disk drive now. It'll be more rugged, faster, and I'm looking forward to it. We'll always use disks for certain things, but we're about to see a huge tectonic change between how we use disks and how we use flash."

Wow. Although I still have some of the first flash computers – remember the HP Jornada 780? – if this works out, it'll change mobile computing. But I wonder if we'll really see the cost per gigabyte of flash approaching a hard drive. I don't think so. And with computer users storing more and more huge video and photo files, we'll still need lots of rotating storage. But Vista makes good use of flash with ReadyBoost and ReadyDrives, so I know we're going to put all that flash to good use.