CD and competing technologies in an application driven environment

A representative sample of end user applications are grouped into a limited set of functional storage categories. Various existing and future storage technologies compete for territory in the resulting application/function space. Consideration of relevant factors such as current storage practice, costs, device and system capacity and performance, and technology growth paths explain the rapid growth of CD-ROM in the application space and suggest future rapid growth of write once CD-Recordable and mid to high performance rewritable optical storage.