I’ve noticed over the decades I’ve been following technology a particular pattern in the development and spread of certain technologies:

First comes the idea, then comes the early implementations funded by big money and restricted to a lucky few. Then takes form that can be easily reproduced in quantity, then it becomes cheap and easily available. Now its interesting. This is the pattern that has become famous with the development of personal computer, but it does not only apply to that technology. It is a very common path, perhaps even the majority follow this road in one way or another, and at varying speeds.

• There is of course computers, which were giant machines for military and large companies, to now, where you can get a computer in a chip with a whole development environment for $35 like the Arduino.
• There is a similar trend with social video hosting, first it was the big, centralized players like YouTube, now you can easily have the same features in your own WordPress blog, and there are far to many video blogs to count.
• Wireless communications is another example. 20 years ago, few people would have thought it possible that for less than $100, non-technical people could set up their own wireless communications system. With the arrival of WiFi, few people with computers believe that they could not have one for themselves.

In relation to this, there is the FLOSS model. An open, incremental development model means that the work of creating a new technology can be split up into lots of little parts that many people can do in their spare time. Therefore, no huge organization with lots of capital needed. It is interesting to watch this process first hand with the Makerbot 3D printer. It is a kit that is orders of magnitude cheaper than anything else on the market (its about $800, most commercial ones are $15,000 or more). Their whole machine is open source hardware, and their customers are also quite actively contributing to its development. They have been very open about the machines capabilities, it is still very much in development, yet they have a growing customer base.