I don’t think physical technology is the only thing that is progressing; our understanding of data, and how it is applied, is also progressing and is what drives innovations that allows a company like Google to process a MONUMENTAL quantity of data into a state that allows it to be utilised in ways that really matter – it’s possible to waste an enormous amount of resources crunching data and make it only 2% more useful, but what’s even better is knowing exactly what to do with that data, using half the resources and making it a hundred times more useful.

I think you’re on the money using “hardware” and “knowledge” in the same sentence…. any idiot can throw a million dollars worth of hardware at a problem and then rejoice when the speed increases, but true genius will try to find a way to increase the efficiency of such a process without touching the infrastructure…. and then dance all over the arrogant sods head when they get an extra hundred-fold increase using the same million dollars worth of tech.