And since by definition, the digital economy is borderless, you can't just look at Europe for answers, any more than Nokia and Ericsson could expect to be world leaders in wireless by focusing on Scandinavia. Europe's role is crucial. But it must also be considered in the context of a global village where the only constant is change. There's no question that the digital economy means big disruptions in our familiar ways of thinking. My inflection point for the digital economy is technology - and the changes that technology is driving in the way we live, learn, work, and play.
Technology makes the digital economy possible.
And its impact is relentless. We sell transistors in my business - the semiconductor business. By building first thousands now millions and soon billions of transistors on small chips, the electronics industry has been able to produce generation after generation of smaller, faster and cheaper electronic devices. Consider, for example, the fact that today, I can buy one megabyte of computer storage space with a dollar bill and get back two pennies in change. In 1960, that same megabyte of storage space would have cost me about 22,000 U.S. dollars.