The future is a smarter world of dumber devices

Tom Goodwin is senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media. With smartphones in all of our pockets, it's easy to laugh at Thomas Watson's reputed remark that "there is a world market for about five computers." But what if he was off by only four computers instead of four billion? In the early 2000s, we lived in an era of expensive storage and slow connectivity. Those of us tasked with predicting the future faced a dilemma: Would processing and storage get so cheap that each and every device could store everything ever made, or would connectivity become so robust and far-reaching that everything would be stored remotely.