Close to 19 million people now carry pagers, and almost 12 billion messages were left in voice mail boxes in 1993 alone. Since 1987, homes and offices have added 10 million fax machines, while e-mail addresses have increased by over 26 million. One of today's popular microprocessors, the 486, is built on a tiny piece of silicon, about the size of a dime. A 486 can execute up to 54 million instructions per second. Today's average consumers wear more computing power on their wrists than existed in the entire world before 1961.
Computer power is now eight thousand times less expensive than it was thirty years ago.
It would travel at the speed of sound, and go about six hundred miles on a thimble of gas. Not only has the world changed technologically, but the way we work, where we work, and how long we work has also changed. Work is global. Soon, competition for your very own job will come from practically anywhere on earth and you will change jobs a lot. In 1991, nearly one out of three American workers had been with their employer for less than a year and almost two out of three for less than five years.