Is Flash memory a disruptive technology?

The main case study in the Innovators Dilemma was the computer hard drive market and how each successive wave of smaller hard drives was disruptive and ultimately destructive for the incumbent manufacturers.

Is it going to happen again with compact flash memory?

Compact flash memory is used by digital cameras, mobile phones and in USB memory sticks (they look like a stick of chewing gum) where hard drives are either too large or in most cases too fragile to be used.

Over time the amount of storage available on this flash memory has increased to the point where you can get 2G USB memory sticks and memory cards. The lifetime of the flash memory is also improving all the time.

I believe there at least two main selling points for flash memory

1. Robustness, compared to hard drives you can drop these cards and they will still work.
2. Ease of replacement for backup or additional storage.

Why is flash memory disruptive?

1. It has captured a market separate to hard drives i.e. digital cameras, portable memory sticks and now newer mobile phones.
2. People are starting to think about replacing laptop hard drives with flash memory. For two reasons: robustness and power usage.
3. There is potential for much higher IO (Input/Output) bandwidth with flash.

In the future I believe that flash memory will replace and then surpass hard drive use in modern computers. The cost per megabyte/gigabyte is still high however this will come down over time (as it always has)

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