And yet, if you can wait three years for the first wooden
  boat, it can often be at the head of a convoy which will 
  keep you busy for many thousands of years, sometimes even 
  orders of magnitude more if you take a minute to request 
  that another convoy sets out.
  -  James Gray

I was going to make a point about random access of one bit vs. sequential access of large portions of data, but the comment from google+ above summed it up perfectly.

Thanks for posting. A very insightful analogy, really putting things into perspective.