Tgdaily.com is carrying a story about an interview with Todd Kuchman, inventor of the Scratch-Less Disc. Kuchman has come up with a scratch resistant CD that also wouldn't become stuck in a CD-ROM drive. He spent more than four years developing his design.
Kuchman said he came up with the scratch resistant CD concept after seeing a girl knock over a stack of CDs to the floor. "I just knew she scratched the heck out of those CDs," says Kuchman. Thinking that there had to be a better way; he went home and started designing prototypes in his garage. His first few tries weren't very successful.
This is the sort of innovation I think is really quite essential; we are putting all sorts of effort into making new kinds of media that can store more and more data, but we are not thinking about making disks last longer. Durability is just as important as capacity, and I think that we have lost sight of that somewhat.