This just crossed my mind recently.
In 1995, my parents purchased our first family computer, an NEC Ready series from a Future Shop in Medford, Ore. (When you lived up by the border on the California, you made as many big purchases as possible in Oregon to avoid paying sales tax. Or pumping your own gas.)
It wasn’t top of the line, but toward the high end at $1500+. I can’t remember a lot of the power numbers, but I do remember it came with just-released Windows 95 and the size of the hard drive it boasted: A whopping 1.6 gigabytes.
Fast-forward to 2010. I buy an LG Ally phone running Android 2.1 from a Target in Yuba City, Calif. After the automatic discounts, rebates, and trade-ins, I paid $63.87 for the phone including sales tax. (But I also have a $50 gift card that will be mailed to be, so in reality this phone is going to cost less than $15.)
This phone has a removable memory card the size of my pinkie fingernail that holds 5 times the information of my family’s first tower computer. And I can go out and buy one that would hold 8 times as much as that.
Any company that’s not utilizing this kind of technological advancement to their greatest advantage is just plain nuts.