Absolutely nothing to do with IT, but some very interesting analogies are drawn here. Not to mention the Wired article concerned is fascinating!
Picture this: Two companies in The good ol’ US of A have just begun Manufacturing diamonds. Not just tiny weeny things for drillbits, but big suckers, 2-3 carats. Picture De Beers, one of the largest and most powerful cartels getting cross.
Okay, you’re an informed joe: you know that General Electric could do this in 1954 using a 400 Ton press. What’s different here is that unlike the GE process, for the first time making them is cheaper than buying them.
When I say cheaper, I mean £80. This is for a stone valued (if it was natural) at £11,000. Not bad: Be Beers are sweating already.
Okay lets head on down to company B: set to make a further paradigm shift: Diamond Semiconductors: It had to happen. Maintaining Moore’s Law needs serious hardware. It’s generally accepted that Silicon will melt into puddles due to heat problems before too long: the solution? Of course it’s Doped diamond.
Ah! So there was an IT link in the end? Okay I admit it. One of the championed processes is a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process that promised to make diamonds large enough for a Semiconductor Substrate. Now we are down to £4 per carat.
You can possibly imagine that De Beers are fractionally annoyed about these developments and here is where the second computing link comes in: World dominating price fixed product suddenly finds itself up against free competition which is growing in poularity and performance every day. Any takers?
Has this whetted your appetite? Read the whole article at Wired. The Companies Websites are on the Links Page
Source: Article By TurboTas