Information exhaust can be captured, processed, and recycled to improve business performance. Opportunities exist to provide turbocharged information services in all businesses and industries. The irony is that turbocharged information service businesses often become worth more than the businesses form which the information was generated in the first place. The cost of most electronic storage technologies decreases by a factor of two every two to three years. Most people in the information business find that despite this increased economy in storage, their total expenditure for memory increases continually.
Information is leaky, that is, it runs through the narrowest cracks and floods the area below.
Management of complexity is perhaps the most crucial problem of our time. The computer is a tool that manages complexity, and as such, just as highways encourage more cars, the computer invites more complexity into society. Sometimes the local picture matters as much as the global one. None of these has improved unambiguously over the last generation. The real pitfall is not to overvalue or undervalue information, or the amount of information available, but to be mesmerized and anesthetized by it.