Many companies these days can be well understood by viewing them from their computer systems out, although business schools and executives might disagree. An airline is computers that have crew, airplanes, schedules and passengers to juggle. A phone company consists of a lot of equipment either controlled by software or tested by such equipment, plus customers, repair folk, billing, and marketing, all totally dependent on working computer systems.
All these data intensive companies are affected by the amazingly improved price performance of computers, but how? Problems that were very difficult 6 years ago should now be easy, and previously unthinkable applications should now be merely very difficult. And so it is. I shall illustrate both sorts from phone company examples, and try to extrapolate some meaning for computer science.