I personally think optical drives (CDs, DVDs, and even BluRay) will disappear from computers fairly quickly. They will become the next floppy drive, but unlike floppies I think they will disappear relatively quickly whereas floppies took like a decade to go away.
Look at the downsides of this technology. They have relatively low storage capacity; CDs can hold about 700MB, DVDs can store about 8GB, and BluRay can store about 50GB. This might sound like a lot, but in a day when a typical hard drive is 750GB these storage numbers are low. Another problem is the size of the media. Yes discs are fairly small, but they are still almost 5" in diameter. In an age when computers are getting smaller, the optical drive is not. Already it's becoming very common for ultra-portable laptops to not have an optical drive.
Probably the greatest downfall of optical discs is speed (or lack thereof). They discovered years ago there is a maximum retrieval speed on discs. They can't physically spin the discs any faster because the rotational forces tear the disc apart. Do you remember when CD-ROM drives went from single speed, to double, to quad, to 16x, etc. They moved up in speed quite quickly. But then they plateaued at around 50x. Why is that? Simple, beyond that the disc is spinning to fast and the disc shatters.
Yet another problem is the fragile nature of the discs. They are easy to scratch which can make the data irretrievable. Also, "burned" discs are very susceptible to light. Manufactures use to claim 20 years or more life on their product, but recent studies suggest discs will fail much earlier than that. I think the given average now is about 5 years. Even burned discs which have been kept out of light the entire time will have a lifetime between 5 and 10 years.
Optical media does have two things going for it. First they are cheap, dirt cheap. They are also ubiquitous in that it's not hard to find a place to stick in an optical disc.
In addition to the above problems, advances in other technologies will help bring an end to optical discs, at least in computer use. USB flash drives are an incredible thing. They are smaller, faster, greater capacity, and less fragile than a disc. And when I say faster - reading is faster and writes are significantly faster. Other technologies that will lead to the downfall of discs is a greater reliance of downloadable content and the proliferation of wireless networks. Lastly, I think small external hard drives will fill in the final pieces. Say your computer has a 500GB hard drive that is half full. That will take 32 DVDs to backup your data (not to mention countless hours of your time). Or you can back it up onto a single external hard drive. I have an external hard drive at home that is smaller than a single CD case but has the complete backup of 3 different machines on it.
Look at the history of computer media. Tapes came first, but they were big and slow. Once the floppy was invented the tape was pushed into the background. But floppies too were slow and low capacity, they eventually were replaced by optical discs. But now optical discs are slow and offer low capacities. Now that USB flash drives and, to a lesser degree, external hard drives exist how long can optical media continue to survive?
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