Intuit recently held a training session on the nature of Disruption, and I wanted to note two disruptions that I believe are happening today.

The first is fairly well known: solid state disks. Companies like SanDisk are making larger capacity memory cards every year. There are even 256gig solid state drives available now.

This disruption is following the classic pattern - coming into the market by providing memory for devices that cannot use hard drives - e.g. keychains, cell phones, cameras. I have an old Sony camera that uses a 3.5″ floppy drive of all things. Solid state memory is clearly the better solution.

But it isn’t good enough for bigger computers. Not good enough even for laptops - too expensive. However, for the newer, small Netbooks, it IS good enough.

Big drive makers are chasing the larger capacity market, but they’ll eventually be niche players for the very large capacity systems, while the mainstream will be switching to solid state. Seagate was smart to invest in SanDisk early on.

The second disruption is just beginning, and I haven’t seen anything about it - although I doubt I’m the only person who recognizes it. This disruption is Cloud Computing, more specifically, it’s offshoot Utility Computing.

Utility computing isn’t going to disrupt the personal computer any time soon, but what it will disrupt is the traditional corporate data center - big air-conditioned rooms with racks and racks of servers delivering one or more applications. Why hire a big technical staff, pay for facilities, add and maintain hardware when you can just outsource the entire thing with a single click? Amazon AWS is a big player in this space right now. You can get one-click deployment of your application, use practically unlimited storage, and even speed up the delivery of your app through Amazon’s Cloudfront - putting the data geographically closer to your customers.

Why would anyone attempt to implement such an infrastructure for themselves? If services like Amazon AWS can manage to guarantee the security, privacy and ownership of the applications and data that exists on their systems, they will quickly eliminate the corporate data center.

If you’re like me you use and love Firefox. You probably have a few add-ons and hopefully one of them is ThumbStrips. The popularity of Firefox add-ons can be overwhelming if you visit the Mozilla site and quickly realize how many add-ons there are. Mozilla just launched “Fashion Your Firefox” that will help to streamline the process by which you download great add-ons.

Fashion Your Firefox is an edited, shorter list of Firefox add-ons, chosen by Mozilla staffers. There are a few categories to choose from and only a few add-ons in each category. If you check out the Fashion Your Firefox site, you’ll notice under the Digital Pack Rat category ThumbStrips is one of their choices!

If you get a chance, check out Fashion Your Firefox and the variety of great add-ons you can download for Firefox.