What the market wants is every map, book, song, movie, game, and poem ever made to be instantly accessible, searchable, and reviewable. They want their work to be autosyncing, autobackedup, and to follow them from device to device. They want to be able to securely talk with friends and family at any time, to publically talk with friends and family at any time, to discover new friends and family, and to be able to completely disconnect from friends and family at will. They want intelligent tools that keep them from making dumb decisions, tools to help them make even better good decisions, and tools that won't get in the way of them making dumb decisions.
I think that the market for computing power has a looong way to go before it taps-out what the market demands.
But how much do they want all this, and does this require major improvements in computing power?
It looks to me that almost everything you listed could be done on the computers of five years ago. It's all nothing but software improvements. Existing hardware is good enough.
Two years ago, I was developing some HVAC equipment modeling software as part of a sales automation package whose worst case scenario needed to calculate the max cooling capacity, and a few other thermodynamic stats, for roughly 18 million different configurations. No matter how much I optimized it, the CPU didn't have enough juice to "instantaneously" plow through all of that math. The best I could get it down to was about 20 seconds. More CPU power would definitely be nice.
But how much did that 20 seconds delay cost you? It would have been nice to have the answer faster, but how much would you have been willing to shell out for it?
I'm talking about economics. I'm talking about what people are willing to pay for.
The customer would have loved for it to go faster, because then it would have looked like magic.
In 1998, it would have been nice if I had had photo-realistic computer games, but I patiently made do with what I had. Today, people eagerly shell-out money for hardware that can run this year's even-more-photorealistic version of Madden Football.
I think the demand for more power is definitely there.
I think that the market for computing power has a looong way to go before it taps-out what the market demands.