In 1969, the Neiman Marcus catalog offered the first home PC, a stylish stand-up model called the Honeywell Kitchen Computer, priced at $10,600. The picture shows an aproned housewife caressing the machine, with this tag line: "If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute." That image should be on every cubicle in Silicon Valley; it's a testament both to what technologists get right and what they get badly wrong. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. Free: The Future of a Radical Price Download the audiobook » (285 MB .zip) This player requires Flash. To their credit, they understood that Moore's law would bring computing within the reach of regular people. But they had no idea why anyone would want it. Despite countless brainstorming sessions and meetings on the subject, the only application the Honeywell team could think of for a home computer (aside from the perennial checkbook balancing) was recipe card management. So the Kitchen Computer was aimed at housewives and featured integrated counter space. Those housewives would, however, require a programming course (included in the price), since the only way to enter data was with binary toggle switches, and the machine's only display was binary lights. Needless to say, not a single Kitchen Computer is recorded as having sold. Today, of course, we have computers in every home—and in every pocket and car and practically everywhere else. But one of the few things the average person doesn't use them for is managing recipe cards. Don't blame Honeywell—blame the computing world of the 1960s. In those days, computers were expensive mainframes. Because processing power was so scarce and valuable, it was reserved for use by IT professionals, mostly working for big companies and the government. Engineers both built the computers and decided how to use them—no wonder they couldn't think of nonengineering applications. But as the Kitchen Computer hinted, computers would soon get smaller and cheaper. This would take them out of the glass boxes of the mainframe world—and away from the IT establishment—and put them in the hands of consumers. And the real transformation would come when those regular folks found new ways to use computers, revealing their true potential. For more, visit wired.com/video Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson discusses his latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. All this was possible because Alan Kay, an engineer at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, understood what Moore's law was doing to the cost of computing. He decided to do what writer George Gilder calls "wasting transistors." Rather than reserve computing power for core information processing, Kay used outrageous amounts of it for frivolous stuff like drawing cartoons on the screen. Those cartoons—icons, windows, pointers, and animations—became the graphical user interface and eventually the Mac. By 1970s IT standards, Kay had "wasted" computing power. But in doing so he made computers simple enough for all of us to use. And then we changed the world by finding applications for them that the technologists had never dreamed of. This is the power of waste. When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right it can change the world. The problem is that abundant resources, like computing power, are too often treated as scarce. Consider another example: Wired's IT department used to send out occasional emails telling employees it was time to "delete unneeded files from the shared folders"—their way of saying they had run out of storage room on the servers. Because we're good corporate citizens, we all dutifully scanned through our files, deleting those we could live without. Perhaps you've done the same. One day, after years of this ritual, I began to wonder just how much storage capacity we actually had. Turns out, not so much: 500 gigabytes. At the time, a terabyte of memory (1,000 gigabytes) cost about $130. I had recently purchased a standard Dell desktop PC for my family, which the kids used for playing videogames; it came with a terabyte internal hard drive. My children had twice as much storage as my entire staff.

Scarcity vs. Abundance Management Scarcity Abundance Rules Everything is forbidden unless it is permitted. Everything is permitted unless it is forbidden. Social model Paternalism ("We know what's best") Egalitarianism ("You know what's best") Profit plan Business model We'll figure it out Decision process Top-down Bottom-up Organizational structure Command and control Out of control How did this happen? The answer is simple: We had gotten stuck thinking that storage was expensive, when in fact it had become dirt cheap. We treated the abundant thing—hard drive capacity—as if it were scarce, and the scarce thing—people's time—as if it were abundant. The corporate bureaucracy had gotten the equation backward. (Let me hasten to add that my office quickly added a heap of storage, and those emails don't go out anymore!) This happens all over the place. When your phone company tells you that your voicemail inbox is full, that's artificial scarcity—it costs less than a nickel to store 100 voice messages, and the average iPod could store more than 100,000 of them (voice messages are recorded at lower quality than music, so they take up less space). By forcing subscribers to spend time deleting voicemails, the phone companies were saving a little on storage costs by spending a lot of consumer time. They managed the scarcity they could measure (storage) but neglected to manage a much more critical scarcity (customer goodwill). No wonder phone companies are second only to cable TV companies in "most hated" rankings. For more, visit wired.com/video Chris Anderson discusses "Free." But the funny thing about waste is that it's all relative to your sense of scarcity. Our grandparents grew up in an age when a long-distance telephone call was an expensive luxury, to be scheduled and kept short. Even today, many find it hard to keep people of that generation on a long-distance call for very long—they still hear a meter ticking in their head and rush to finish. But our kids are growing up in an age when long distance is free on their cell phones. They'll happily chat for hours. From the perspective of 1950s telecom costs, that's incredibly wasteful. But today, when those costs have fallen to near zero, we don't give it a second thought. It doesn't feel like waste at all. Nature Wastes Life Our brains seem wired to resist waste, but we are relatively unique in nature for this. Mammals have the fewest offspring in the animal kingdom, and as a result we invest enormous time and care in protecting each one so that it can reach adulthood. The death of a single human is a tragedy, one that survivors sometimes never recover from, and we prize the individual life above all. Percentage of your CPU's transistors used for … Waiting for you to do something Genie effect and other UI frippery Running programs you forgot you opened Spyware keylogging your passwords Work As a result, we have a very developed sense of the morality of waste. We feel bad about the unloved toy or the uneaten food. Sometimes this is for good reason, because we understand the greater social cost of profligacy, but often it's just because our mammalian brains are programmed that way. However, the rest of nature doesn't work like that. A bluefin tuna can release 10 million fertilized eggs in a spawning season. Perhaps 10 of them will hatch and make it to adulthood. A million die for every one that survives. But there's good reason for it. Nature wastes life in search of better life. It mutates DNA, creating failure after failure, in the hope that some new sequence will eventually outcompete those that came before and the species will evolve. In other words, nature tests its creations by killing most of them quickly—the battle "red in tooth and claw" that determines reproductive advantage. Nature is so wasteful because scattershot strategies are the best way to do what mathematicians refer to as fully exploring "the potential space." Imagine a desert with two pools of water separated by some distance. If you're a plant growing next to one of those pools, you can follow one of two different reproductive strategies. You can drop seeds near your roots, where there's a pretty good chance they'll find water. This is safe but soon leads to crowding. Or you can toss the seeds to the wind and let them float far away. This means that almost all will die, but it's the only way to find that second pool of water, where life can expand into a new niche, perhaps a richer one. The way to get from what the mathematicians call a local maximum to the global maximum is to explore a lot of fruitless minima along the way. It's wasteful, in a sense, but it can pay off in the end. The science fiction writer Cory Doctorow calls this "thinking like a dandelion." He writes: "The disposition of each—or even most—of the seeds isn't the important thing, from a dandelion's point of view. The important thing is that every spring, every crack in every pavement is filled with dandelions. The dandelion doesn't want to nurse a single precious copy of itself in the hopes that it will leave the nest and carefully navigate its way to the optimum growing environment, there to perpetuate the line. The dandelion just wants to be sure that every single opportunity for reproduction is exploited!" This is how to embrace waste. Seeds are too cheap to meter. It feels wrong, even alien, to throw so much away, but it's the right way to take advantage of abundance.