Last night I spent about two hours listening to music with my wife, kids, and former aupair. We surfed around on Youtube and listened to such venerable oldies as Fine Young Cannibals (She drives me crazy), Ozzy Osbourne (Crazy Train), Nirvana (Smells like teen spirit), Quiet Riot, Def Leopard, Depechemode, New Order, Falco, Bon Jovi, Leonard Cohen and of course Paul Robinson. We also listened to a spattering of new stuff (much of which I couldn't stand) including Scooter (I liked sort of) and the beatbox flute guy(awesome). When I got tired enough I wandered up to bed. On the way up I noticed the time and I was a bit shocked. I was going to bed literally two hours later than I normally do. This got me to thinking about the new model and the new distributions methodology. It used to be that people spent $1000s collecting albums and playing the albums. Even the most extensive collection was limited to a mere smattering of what was available. However in several hours last night I listened to my old favorites, some new favorites and we spent hours talking about and appreciating the various elements of music that even ten years ago would have been impossible (at least in this format). So, whats my point?

My point is pretty straight forward: As the range of connectivity solutions increase and the range and things we care about increases, storage solutions become more important. I have a 140GB hard drive in my AppleTV box, but, realistically, all of the content I watched last night was a function of three things:

Remote storage (and lots of it).

Deep search algorithms.

High bandwidth connectivity.

These solutions are smack dab in the middle of the products we work on. High throughput, cheap and deep storage solutions and persistent archiving and search functionality. Unlike a brain surgeon, I actually get to use the stuff I build and repair... I have a great job.