Dell, in his autobiography, Direct From Dell, says: "The internet puts control firmly in the hands of the buyer, not the seller, as geography and physical location become largely irrelevant to price and product selection."

The convergence of computers and mobile phones alongside the drive towards free-to-user is also causing many commercial telephony providers to come up with innovative ideas, all of which cut a young person's — or anyone else's — communication costs to a big fat zero much of the time. Skype has made telephone and video conferencing free for private and business users. Google is in the process of integrating free telephone calls into its free email service. And you can even Skype free from many mobile phones. 

The brave new sharing world is still in nappies. It's not even a toddler yet. The question of how businesses will sustainably monetise their free-to-user online operations is also hugely important and largely unresolved. There are concerns over security issues within the Cloud, even worries over finding the power to run those ever more ubiquitous farms of computer servers. 

Yet among knowledgeable computer industry figures, a mood of optimism prevails — optimism that the sharing, super-connected world of the future is going to continue to amaze and delight us more, perhaps, than we can imagine. 

A senior Dell engineer, Forrest Norrod, suggests that the new sharing world could even be part of our evolution as a species. "Millions of years ago, humans developed a mechanism to communicate more efficiently and with greater information content than other species," says Norrod. "We evolved speech, then drawing, then writing. And each time, we have increased the amount of information content that can be efficiently communicated between people. Because of that, we have upped our ability to learn and our ability to share and transmit knowledge. This is the fundamental underpinning of who we are. And I am sure our brains have adapted and eventually will evolve.

"All forms of communication, and now Cloud computing, continue to develop and make the cost of communication and the cost of sharing information lower and lower and lower. It's now practically zero. If you extrapolate this out, eventually it's just zero cost to instantaneously access any other person or any piece of data in the world."