Not as crazy as the headline supposes. Guess the next step is a vacuum?

There must be a better pun about “floating data into the cloud” here somewhere :)

I can't wait until we have hermetically sealed, mineral oil hard drives and computers.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/05/intel-servers-mineral-oil-cooling/

Thermaltake tried to do a minimalist, air-enclosed system, but they didn't go far enough.

Pretty soon your computer will just be a big vat of some goo that you throw your latest computer components into and it all gets properly assimilated and the old, unused stuff gets flushed.

Greg, I long for that future. I'd like a goobot, please!

Once we get to the point where every movie, TV show, and piece of music ever made can fit on a hard drive the size of a ring, then what?

Lifecasting?

I don't think the goocomp/bot technology is that far away.

As for rings, the content will grow to fill up all available space.

Despite that, there still will still be a huge gap on information on the Web between the 1960's and 1995 that will never get filled in.

Are you saying everything will get stored in increasingly high resolution, and backed up heavily.

The huge loss of information 1960-1995 is no worse than the loss of early everything humans did before the Printing Press.

Which is not really an issue since the amount of aggregate knowledge humanity has until 1995 pales in comparison to all the knowledge created in the 17 years since.

Going forward, everything seems to be accelerating...

Well there you go, not just higher resolution and backed up, but more knowledge....lots and lots and lots more of it.

Someday we'll be able to backup the entire Internets in our pockets?

That could be really handy whenever LTE (or whatever comes next) is flailing.

Wireless carriers will ALWAYS be flailing no matter what technology they adopt.

As the former CEO of ATT wireless once told me, selling bandwidth is like selling milk. You can have 1%, low fat, homogenized, buttermilk, whatever, but at the end of the day it's just milk.

Milk is a great product because it expires and then you have to buy it again.

Nanotech, DNA-encoding, quantum computing... I don't think storage is going to be an issue. Search on the other hand is only going to get more and more important unless we come up with some sort of effective universal meta-tagging/indexing system (if that's even feasible.)

You're going to have EVERYTHING at your fingertips. Good luck finding what you want, though.

Search becomes more important once everything is available.

I'm beginning to believe that Evernote is a SEARCH company.

Should Google worry?

I don't think they have any advantage in the search algorithm department. It's something they might want to look at down the road considering where things are headed.

Even if they did have their eyes on search, Microsoft has realized just how strong the Google brand is with their investment in Bing. It's too much of an uphill climb unless you're literally twice as good.

Unless you're somewhere Google isn't.

Evernote is the world leader in personal search.

As in, search my stuff. Evernote's brand is trusted for that.

Google is the world leader in hyperlinked web search.

That's not search my stuff. That's search hyperlinked stuff.

So unless someone is going to hyperlink everything, Google has no advantage when the goal is to search everything.

And I'd say Google is at a disadvantage when it comes to "my stuff" -- because they already know so much, it's hard to give them even more power, I'd say.

I see your point but I don't think it's that easy.

If Google really wanted to own that space and saw it as a priority they could throw enough engineers and marketing dollars behind it to make Evernote's life really really expensive and uncomfortable.

And if Google bundled an Evernote clone into Android they could probably cripple Evernote almost overnight.

Evernote's brand still means nothing to most mainstream people. You're not famous until my mom knows who you are. My mom knows who Google is. My mom doesn't know what an Evernote is. If push comes to shove and the two went head to head most people would go with Google out of lizard brain brand recognition.

I don't think the Google-knows-too-much-about-me fear is all that widespread. Or it's widespread until you offer someone a coupon and then they are generally happy to sell all their privacy for a nickel. Sad but true.

It does seem like a killerapp to bundle the entire Internet, indexed and searchable, with every copy of Android.

We'll tell our grandchildren stories about how we used to query machines up in the clouds for answers. :)

Search is limited.  We need it, and it should get better, but we need an additional, alternative mechanism.  That's what I've been working on for several years now, although only somewhat concretely until recently.  Some problems solved, some problems to go.  And I plan to leverage things that exist, including Evernote, and run on everything.

Steve, are you referring to an automatic recording device that always stores everything you see and do?

No, although that is an interesting topic too.  I'm talking about the alternative(s) to search.  Organizing information in a way that is navigable via new kinds of user interface paradigms.

I'm glad I asked. That sounds utterly fascinating.

Organizing and Searching are two sides of the same coin, right?