But still, that means several of those highly-valued SV companies could afford to buy most gunmakers in existence...
Note also that SpaceX has more accurate ballistic missiles than the U.S. and Russia (PeaceKeeper CEP = 40M, while SpaceX routinely lands rockets upright within a ~10M radius on a drone ship), and Google has more data than the CIA & NSA (why else did the NSA try to wiretap them?). The microchip revolution put enormous capabilities in the hands of those organizations that know how to code effectively, such that Silicon Valley startups can often do things that were the sole province of national governments for decades.
It's not at all clear who has more data between GOOG and NSA. Both don't exactly declare the numbers, but it is known that in several recent years NSA has been the largest single buyer of spinning disks in the world.
Tech companies have indeed become powerful, but let's not get hyperbolic. The world hasn't become shadowrun quite yet.
The rest of the world moved to SSDs in ~2010. Google's been storing the whole web on flash since then. (I guess if you're archiving for slow-speed retrieval disks are still useful, but if that's your use-case, why wouldn't you use tape?)
Spinning disk is cost competitive with tape robots these days, while offering much better access performance. There's a few different vendors that supply this sort of setup, or you can build your own backblaze style. The core idea is you build storage servers that can hold more disks than can be active at any given moment. Powering up a drive and doing a seek is a lot faster than a tape robot.
Because there are many orders of latency magnitude between spinning rust and tape.
We still use a lot of spinning disk for precisely this reason - you get roughly 5x the online capacity for the same cost and automation does not whine about wanting the new shiny.
I guess it fits the NSA's use-case though, where they have ~thousands of analysts running complex queries but no external users, rather than ~billions of external users running well-defined queries.
One is travelling at tremendous speed (Mach 5 or something?) and has milliseconds for course-corrections, the aspires to come to a gentle halt and can close some feedback loops over and over again for thousands of milliseconds.
Edit: If you wish to make a weapons comparison, one might note that SpaceX can launch the mother of all MIRVs over and over again. The lower cost-to-orbit changes the economic calculus of rods-from-god, opening a possibility of a conventional-weapons bombardment from the other side of the planet for the first time.
Much higher, about mach 20 to 25. They are moving seriously fast.
That does a great job of placing the accuracy problem in context: That's ~7 km/second, or perhaps a mile per eyeblink.
If a tech company were buying the country, market cap would be the appropriate metric, and market caps for those tech companies are in the $2T range, more than enough to pay a few times annual GDP.
I can't easily find the valuation of Sony BMG or EMI at the time.
(Sorry if the changed magasine design was about something else.)
But only at the Turks!