And the drop is inversely proportional to performance. A decade ago, if your computer had any hard drive at all, the best you might hope for probably wasn't more than 20 or 30 megabytes. Today, you can buy a 6.4 gigabyte hard drive for about six cents a megabyte. The best of the inkjet printers now meets or exceeds the performance of laser printers. Dramatic drops in price and continued improvements in performance affect virtually every aspect of computing.
Monitors are better and cheaper, as are scanners, modems, software, and CPUs.
There's every reason to believe these improvements in value and performance will continue well into the future. Today, the figure is much higher. The same is true for fax machines. Four years ago the number of booksellers with Web sites was in the single digits. Today the figure exceeds 600 and continues to rise.