I hope to thus show that medicine may prove to have perfect timing in waiting until now to embrace IT and Internet technology. Each of these developments deserves explanation. Hardware to the Rescue Hardware looks as if it is finally going to stay a step ahead of our demands. Desktop systems have finally become powerful enough that we can have graphically rich environments, and still have computing power left over to do some serious data-crunching. These tedious details, if not carefully attended to, are what cause computers to crash.
Software is now typically the single most expensive component of a desktop computer.
However, it appears that software is about to follow the same cost plunge. With these price structures, it seems inevitable that market forces will force traditional software vendors to drop their prices significantly in the future. The collapse of hardware costs, and a probably inevitable corresponding collapse in software costs, promise to be big reasons why medical organizations may ultimately congratulate themselves for not investing as heavily as others in computer technology in the past decade. It appears that standards are gaining ground over proprietary approaches to storing and transmitting information. The move to public domain standards is most striking in data communications, the heart of the Internet.