Scott Henderson Inc.: RAID

For decades the electronics industry has been working tirelessly to make tiny versions of bigger devices just so we can carry them around—a redundancy based on size. Cell phones are tiny versions of bigger landline phones; the laptop’s initial purpose was to be portable compared to a desktop. These devices create, process, and store data independently, transferring information back to more powerful feature-rich base stations by syncing, docking, and downloading memory sticks to hard drives. And all because we can’t carry the big one. All around us we see obsolescent media storage replaced by remote servers that can deliver whatever we want whenever we want it. Every time we watch pay-per-view, one more DVD goes the way of the VHS cassette: good-bye, Tower Records; hello, iTunes.

You can already access your PC remotely through Internet-based platforms such as GoToMyPC.com and many others like it, using all of your computer’s programs to create, store, and print data—from anywhere on earth. With the soaring popularity of these platforms, their functionality will evolve like lightning. The future mobile work space will not have redundancies in devices based on size; instead, it will have distinct separation between the base station and our mobile access to it. The “remote-access input device,” or RAID, will control a distant and invisible engine so that we won’t have to carry a second smaller engine around in our pocket. We won’t have two of everything—big ones and little ones. This disruption will replace the concept of “microelectronics” with an invisible and seamless digitopia. Our computing power will then be as omnipresent as oxygen, and almost as easy to carry.