Home made DVDs fade. File formats fall out of favor. No matter where we store our digital stuff, there is no guarantee it will last. Kevin Kelly suggests a new strategy: Replace storage with movage.
Good advice. I wonder if disk drive makers have something to learn from this. Storage needs are constantly growing, but making hard drives is no longer a great business. At a recent dinner, Seagate execs ably diagnosed the difficulties of their current business model as a maker of raw storage, but struggled to articulate a plausible exit strategy into high margin consumer products and services (think iPod).
What about movage? There may be a great service business here, linking local storage and the cloud, constantly moving bits back and forth and running file format translations as necessary. The whole thing feels like it could be scheduled and automated, and run through an archiving engine -- sort of like Tivo for your personal bits.
Like most people, I find archiving a chore and don't do an adequate job. But if software could do the job for me, or most of the job, I'd be willing to pay Tivo-like monthly rates for that.
