A World of Bytes

Curt Monash

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The single stupidest quote in the history of information technology

By CurtMonash on Tue, 04/21/09 - 2:10pm.

A reporter just sent me an embargoed press release from IBM which includes the oft-used quote:

By 2010, the codified information base of the world is expected to double every 11 hours.

(Other versions refer to "human knowledge" as being what will double.)

I've been seeing that piece of idiocy for years, and I'm fed up. Any non-moron with at least an eighth-grade education should be able to quickly see why it is wrong. Indeed, it turns out that well under one years' doubling of ANYTHING at that rate would consume all the atoms in the known universe, of which there are only 10^137 or so.

I imagine that what really happened is that one year somebody said "By 2010 or so, the annual increase in human knowledge will be 1500x the sum total of knowledge today", by some metric. OK, maybe that's defensible or even correct. But it is no excuse for the nonsensical distortion of the idea that has long been making the rounds.

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About A World of Bytes

Curt Monash is a leading analyst of and strategic advisor to the software industry. Praised by Lawrence J. Ellison for his "unmatched insight into technology and marketplace trends," Curt was the software/services industry's #1 ranked stock analyst while at PaineWebber, Inc., where he served as a First Vice President until 1987. He subsequently co-founded Evernet, Inc., a $40 million networking systems integrator. Since 1990, he has owned and operated Monash Research, an analysis and advisory firm covering software-intensive sectors of the technology industry. In that period he also has been co-founder, president, or chairman of several other technology startups.

Curt has served as a strategic advisor to many well-known firms, including Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, AOL, CA, and Netezza. Curt earned a Ph.D. in mathematics (Game Theory) from Harvard University. He has held faculty positions in mathematics, economics and public policy at Harvard, Yale, and Suffolk universities.