It’s quite another if the supply of stuff you want to store is also rising at a similar geometric rate.īegin with the conventional wisdom. It would be one thing if just the costs of storage were dropping. Today that amount of storage hardware costs just two cents. But the universe of book-like things to be stored virtually is poised to explode at a vastly higher rate.Īt the dawn of the Internet – circa late 1980s – it cost $10,000 for the electronic hardware (disk drives) to store the content of a single book. And for efficiency mavens, unlike the ‘real’ world, the energy used per book stored in the virtual world will keep falling. The future cost of storing digital things is still collapsing at Moore’s Law kind of rates – which is to say geometrically.įor the energy conscious amongst us, a related interesting factoid storing a book virtually also costs about the same today in terms of just the electricity used as it does storing its physical counterpart in a warehouse. The future cost of storing physical things is essentially fixed, tied to slow-moving metrics like the cost of land, steel and concrete, and labor. In an intriguing and temporary coincidence, storing a physical book in a U-Store-It warehouse today costs almost exactly the same as storing a virtual book in the Cloud - about $0.20 per year per book. But with data storage growing at nearly 50 percent a year, it will only take a little over a half-dozen years for consumer virtual storage to become a bigger industry than physical storage. ![]() But so far the self-storage industry for consumer data hasn’t broken the $1 billion revenue mark, globally. Now it’s nearly trivial to store 30 photo albums worth of digital pictures, or the video equivalent, for every American. And when they started to get some, they were expensive…you know the story. Once upon a time, an Internet ‘century’ ago – say circa 1985 – people didn’t need to store digital files. The self-storage industry manages two billion square feet of space now enough space to store about 30 books or photo albums for every American. Gotta put it somewhere … to paraphrase Carlin. The huge drop in the real cost of things since 1912 led to people owning a lot of everything there’s been a roughly ten-fold drop in the real cost of men’s suits, women’s shoes, golf clubs and even books. Never mind off-site, most houses didn’t even have or need much in the way of closets. Once upon a time, a century ago, people didn’t need to store much stuff away from home because no one had much of anything. ![]() Well, at least they bought a lot of stuff while the economy was expanding. ![]() Demographics and wealth drove this trend everyone has more stuff. In fact, it’s been the fastest growing sector in commercial real estate, with five public companies and hundreds of smaller operators. Over the past three decades, America’s boxes-and-sofas self-storage industry – comprised of companies like Public Storage and U-Store-It - has grown ten-fold to a $22 billion a year business.
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