Yesterday I blogged about one obvious consequence of the cost reductions that Moore’s Law brings to us with computer technology: the likelihood of ubiquitous computing in the next few years. Today, I’ll blog about three other consequences:

• Disposable computers
• Multiple computer gadgets for everyone, not just one
• Shift in power, as scarce technology becomes a commodity

Cheap Computers Means Disposable Computers

When I bought a fully-equipped laptop for $4,000 several years ago, I treated it like a precious, delicate jewel. Now I can buy a run-of-the-mill laptop, or an entry-level iPad, for about $500; at that price, I can afford to be a little more cavalier about it. If it cost only $50, I wouldn’t throw it away after a day’s use, but I might buy two or three of them (as I’ll discuss below). But for $5, or for $0.50, the computer truly becomes disposable.

This is not such a radical idea. Toward the end of the film-based camera era, Kodak began promoting the notion of “disposable cameras” — perhaps because so many amateur photographers found it difficult to load a new roll of film into the older, traditional (expensive) cameras. Kodak’s new model came with pre-loaded film; and when you finished taking the 24 images, you brought the whole thing into the neighborhood photo shop — with the expectation that you would get 24 prints in a few days, but you would never see the camera again.

As for disposable computers, I have to admit that my imagination is somewhat limited. The first (and almost only) thing that comes to mind is computer chips embedded in the packaging that surrounds the products that we buy — products which themselves might be consumable, or disposable, but which would still benefit from, say, ongoing quality control for freshness and safety. Thus, when you buy a carton of FutureMilk, an embedded chip tells you if it’s still fresh; when you finish consuming the milk, you toss the empty carton in the trash. Same thing with cans or bottles of FutureCoke and FutureBeer, boxes of FutureCereal, and bags of FutureTacoChips.

I think we’re also likely to see more “smart” devices that retrieve, store, and manipulate data about our day-to-day lives, as well as interacting with us in some useful way — but which have a limited, short-term “life span,” after which we expect them to “die” without making all of its accumulated data available to anyone else. We already have primitive versions of this with plastic hotel room-keys, and metro-cards that we “fill up” with electronic funds, but ultimately throw away. I suspect we’ll have a lot more gadgets of this kind, even if I can enumerate a bunch of specific examples.

Multiple computer gadgets for everyone

I was a child of the 1950s, and I grew up in a typical middle-class American household. If you looked in my closet, you would have found one pair of shoes. If you asked why I didn’t have more than one pair, I probably would have said, “I only have one pair of feet. What would I do with the other ones?”

Today, I have a couple dozen pairs of shoes. I have black dress shoes, and brown dress shoes; and I have a couple more pairs of (black) dress shoes that have thicker soles, so I can stand all day long when I’m presenting lectures and seminars. I have walking shoes, jogging shoes, gym shoes, and casual “tennis” shoes (which I don’t use for playing tennis, but for walking on the beach, where they might get soaked by incoming waves). I have leather sandals, and Teva sandals, and two or three different pairs of flip flops. I sometimes wish that I could return to the simpler life of my childhood, where I didn’t have to think about which pair of shoes I would wear … but that’s not the world that Nike and Adidas and Ecco and various other manufacturers really want us to think about very much.

Similarly, it wasn’t all that long ago that I had only one desktop computer — and it was in the office. Then I got a desktop computer at home. Then I got a laptop. Then my wife wanted one. Then my kids wanted one…. and now I have a desktop (with two large display monitors), two laptops, an old Acer laptop for those rare occasions when I absolutely must operate in “pure” Windows mode. And that doesn’t count the iPad or the iPhone, or the Blackberry, or the three old Palm Pilots gathering dust in a desk drawer.

I don’t even think about this very much, but I remember visiting some friends a couple years ago, and expressing surprise that the whole family shared a single laptop computer.

“Why do you think they call it a personal computer?” I asked.

The parents looked at me blankly. (The kids weren’t around.)

“Well, sharing a personal computer is like sharing … well, like sharing a toothbrush!” I exclaimed.

“Yeah,” said one of the parents. “We do.”

I’m not really sure if they were pulling my leg, but I could see that we had no basis for a conversation. And I’ll bet that if I had looked in any of their closets, I would have found more than one pair of shoes.

In my middle-class childhood of the 1950s, we also had only one car, one telephone, one radio, and one television (which didn’t actually arrive in the household until after I had left for college). All of that sounds rather bizarre in today’s world, because most of these items have become affordable enough that we can take advantage of our natural desire — partly pragmatic, partly selfish, and partly driven by the power of Madison Avenue marketing — to have our personal car, telephone, radio, and/or television.

And just as we shrug at the notion of more than one pair of shoes per person, Moore’s Law will make us feel the same way about computing devices. Why do I have two laptops, for example? Well, one of them is the ultra-lightweight Mac Air, with relatively limited power and storage; and the other is a heavier, 17-inch Mac Powerbook Pro, with the fastest processor and largest disk I could find. They serve different purposes, and I use them both.

Remember, also, that we have a number of other “gadgets” that are almost entirely dependent on embedded computer technology. I have five different digital cameras, which doesn’t even count the Blackberry camera (which I haven’t bothered figuring out), or the three obsolete cameras that gather dust on a shelf in my office, but which are still quite capable of taking excellent photos.

I justify the proliferation of these devices by the significant differences in features and functions they provide. But if you were to drop the price by another tenfold or hundred-fold — if, for example, I could buy a top-of-the-line digital camera for $10 — then fashion would come into play. I might want to take my red camera with me on certain days of the week, the green camera on other days, the blue camera on the weekends, and the old-fashioned black camera for “serious” occasions. If my clothes reflected an elegant, chic fashion style (which they don’t!), then I might want to have a dozen different laptops, so I could make sure that the one I took with me on any given day was color-coordinated with my clothes.

Shift in power

To help you appreciate how much things have changed, let me tell you a little about what the “business world” was like when I first graduated from college and began working in a reasonably successful, high-tech computer company. If we wanted to make copies of a paper document, we first had to get approval from a secretary; and then we carried the original piece of paper to the Photocopying Department. It wasn’t called the “xerox room,” and mere mortals like me were not allowed to operated them on our own.

Similarly, if I wanted to make a local phone call from my office, I could pick up the phone on my desk. But if I wanted to make a business call to, say, our office in California, I had to get that approved, too. And then I took the (approved) request to a switchboard operator and scheduled the phone call — usually a day or so in advance. It’s not just that we lacked touch-tone phones, direct-dialing, or area codes; we lacked the authority to use what was then an extremely scarce resource.

Roughly ten years later, I had a software consulting firm with roughly a hundred employees, headquartered in New York. We had a telephone sales department, plus a bunch of other people who had legitimate business reasons for calling clients and co-workers and business partners all over the country. We also had a few employees who snuck into the office at night and called their girl-friend in Puerto Rico, or their mother in Europe. So when we got the monthly phone bill — which was typically on the other of $20,000 — we went over every itemized call to ensure that (a) our employees weren’t misusing a resource that still fairly scarce and expensive, and (b) the phone company wasn’t overcharging us for all of those long-distance calls.

Obviously, the same thing was true with access to computers. Many of today’s IT professionals have no living memory of the days when mainframe computers were locked in sterilized rooms, and batch jobs had to be submitted well in advance — with appropriate approvals and authorizations if those jobs required more than a minimal amount of computing resources.

Intellectually, we all know that access to computing has changed dramatically: we’ve evolved from the days of the mainframe, to the PC, then to the laptop, and now to the mobile smartphone. But if you look at the politics and the “power structure” in many large organizations today, there is still a strong tendency to control access to the computing power that’s available for almost no cost at all. It may come from senior management, or it may come from the IT department. It may be justified by “security,” or government regulations that were written 20 years ago. Or it might be justified simply by the stern message, “We can’t afford to waste precious corporate resources.”

Ironically, we don’t even have to respond to these arguments, threats, and ultimatums (ultimati?) any more … because computing power is so affordable that we no longer depend on our employer. We can buy our own, and to a significant degree, we can decide for ourselves how to use it. You can impose all kinds of restrictions and controls on my use of “corporate” computing resources, but when I walk out the door at the end of the day, I take my iPhone with me. I carry my personal laptop in my backpack, and I go home to my personal desktop, where I access the Internet via my personal service provider, and get my personal e-mail from Google or Yahoo or AOL or any one of a dozen other providers.

And the power shift has just begun: as Moore’s Law makes computing more and more affordable, especially to people in developing countries around the world, the shift will accelerate.