Knowledge == Power == Money
Apologies in advance for linking to the New York Times. Fortunately, these fine folks can get you past that thrice-damned registration system those short-sighted newspapers are so fond of.

As I was saying...

Really, what does Wal-Mart knows about customers' habits, anyways?

A week ahead of the storm's landfall, Linda M. Dillman, Wal-Mart's chief information officer, pressed her staff to come up with forecasts based on what had happened when Hurricane Charley struck several weeks earlier. Backed by the trillions of bytes' worth of shopper history that is stored in Wal-Mart's computer network, she felt that the company could "start predicting what's going to happen, instead of waiting for it to happen," as she put it.

As freaking cool as this is, it also scares me somewhat. I read a short story a long time ago about a kid named Alexander who decided to do what Alexander the Great did -- take over the world. The way the character in the story went about it was by building a computer to analyze historical data and predict the future. Eventually the computer became a precognitive AI* and the kid went on to rule the world... until his computer realized there had never been something like it and crashed. (Bork!)

* Think HAL as a character in Minority Report.

I am of the opinion that history does, to a certain extent, repeat itself. It's never quite the same, but general themes and trends hold. In the Foundation novels, Isaac Asimov imagined the prediction of the future using mathematical analysis of statistics. I see no reason that that can't happen, provided you have enough data.

By its own count, Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, made by NCR, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts.

Well that settles that, I should think. Eep.

I remember being told a long time ago that the magic equation of hurricanes + computers helped get Wal-Mart to the Alpha Retailer position. Just earlier this month another SoftE at school mentioned that thanks to Wal-Mart's uberdatabase, beer and diapers will be found on the same shelf, since any father needing to take care of the baby on a Friday night is likely to grab a six-pack at the same time as the Huggies.

Imagine the potential of having this information open to everyone. Think about all the things we could learn about consumer psychology. Imagine making the start of psychohistory real.

Now consider how much that will never happen, since there's no way Wal-Mart will give up their information without a fight to the death.

Foo.  ¶ 1:20 a.m.