Nicholas Carr: "data has an increasing marginal utility."
Except it doesn't. Well, data only has increasing utilty if you can continue to process it at increasing volumes and get results back in a reasonable amount of time. You're always resource bound, hence there's an opportunity cost to processing very large data sets. Indeed there are branches of computer science dedicated to figuring out what to do next when there's too much data. I'm surprised Carr missed this, given he he has a whole book, "The Big Switch", about computing as a utility.
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Bill, Thanks for the clarification. So, given the constant, rapid fall in the price of storing and processing data, at what point do you see the marginal utility of additional data turning negative? And how do you see that point shifting in coming years? Google, for instance, has said it wants to store 100% of a user's data. If it were to accomplish that, do you think it would be a pyrrhic victory - that the cost would outweigh any gains? Thanks, Nick