We're drowning in data!
When the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, due to come on stream in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.
This shift from information scarcity to surfeit has broad effects. "What we are seeing is the ability to have economies form around the data--and that to me is the big change at a societal and even macroeconomic level," says Craig Mundie, head of research and strategy at Microsoft. Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic input almost on a par with capital and labour. "Every day I wake up and ask, 'how can I flow data better, manage data better, analyse data better?" says Rollin Ford, the CIO of Wal-Mart.
