Today, I can open my Web browser and communicate instantly with Burmese refugees or writers working on projects similar to mine. It's difficult to overestimate the change. In four years, it could well be obsolete. As author Ray Kurzweil and others have pointed out, if cars had improved as much over the past 50 years as computers, they'd cost less than a nickel and go faster than the speed of light. This rate of progress is critical because the advantages of open-source development depend on the powers of technology and the balance between what can be done through thinking and what has to be done by building.
Every product has certain intellectual components and certain physical components built into it.
With a car, for example, the intellectual component is the thought about how to build it, how to set up the assembly lines, and how to process data you have on different kinds of tires. The physical components include the actual rubber in the tires, the machines that ran the tests, the operation and maintenance of factories. Faster computers and increased connectivity are drastically changing the relationship between these components in two ways. First, some things that used to require physical components no longer do. You may not have to buy rubber to test the tires if you can just run a simulator online.