Conundrum or just Con and a Nundrum?
Opinion Column by PC Magazine: Forty Years of Moore’s Law Hogwash — My magazine column is now running online and I want you to read this one. The title alone is worth the price of admission. I enjoyed writing this column and it’s a topic I’ve been putting off for about five years.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Moore’s Law, which began as an observation pretending to be a postulate and looking like an axiom wanting to be a rule, which turned into a law by majority vote. Moore’s Law is none of the above and is, in fact, a gentleman’s agreement to move technology along at a predetermined pace. A drumbeat.
Everyone in the business knows that there is no law in Moore’s Law.
Does it matter if it’s a real honest law of nature if it has been true for 40 years? The fact is, by natural evolution or by design, it has held fairly consistent. So what if it’s a drumbeat? It’s one that lets consumers know, roughly, what to expect when.
You’re very cracky, sir. 🙂
You say it can’t speed up, but IMHO maybe it could. It’s just that it wouldn’t be of much profit to many people.
In the 60’s this was called ‘planned obsolescence’, I don’t know if that term is still used.
Basically the manufacturer’s could theoretically just sell us NOW PCs with the capabilities of a 2010 vintage PC. However, by doing so, they won’t sell us ‘new’ PCs in 2006 and 2008. So it’s much more profitable to just keep it going slowly.
Yes, slowly! For this ‘manic’ pace of ‘evolution’ may have been artificially slowed down. If we could just get those futuristic PCs now we would have less ‘new’ product launches, and things might be a little less overwhelming, in fact! Why launch new stuff every six months if you could just do it once every 5 years?
Imagine, wouldn’t life be so much better? IT people could actually learn how to make stable products, and users could learn how to use them. The investment in time would be worthwhile since it would be useful for more than just a few years. IMHO, it really doesn’t have to be this way.
So Give Us Our Multium X 64 core CPUs With 1Gbps Wireless Networking And 22 Exabyte Hard Drives NOW!!! Or forever be quiet.
Or at least for the next 5 years…
Right on. I think the cycle is going to slow down. My clients are all small businesses, 10 – 100 desktops. They have no reason to upgrade their computers and they are presently on 4 – 5 year replacement cycles. Unless some new killer software comes out, eventually PC sales will slow to the point where we start seeing Moore’s law stretched out to 24 to 30 months.
But you have to give them credit Dvorak, it was a wonderful marketing job.
Too bad we couldn’t have this terrible “law” in software, too.
How is it the hardware manufacturers managed to maintain healthy progress AND competition, while still benefiting from and incorporating each others ideas (through license agreements?).
Why did whoever broke the 100 nanometer? barrier (the lythography and wavelenth of light problem) share that with everyone (through licensing or whatever)? Why didn’t they hog it for themselves? A gentleman’s agreement, perhaps.
Meanwhile, software makers continue to flog the same crap in different clothes at their customers and each other, while dragging their heels to agree on standards that could benefit everyone.
OLE vs. OpenDoc always sticks in my craw when I think about this, even though it wouldn’t have mattered much.
The whole GML-> SGML->(HTML)->XML-> Webservices and SOAs evolutionary chain started in the 70s. Written this way, perhaps this pace of evolution is natural. There’s great potential there.
But think of all the proprietary solutions and client/server crap that business had to endure along the way.
It seems the software on our desktop and in businesses ought to work better by now. I feel that way as a developer, and I know most computers users do, too.