Silicon Insider: The Last Days of Software?

Oct. 5, 2006 — -- Almost everybody in the modern world has heard of Moore's Law. Indeed, as the underpinning of the digital age, it is the metronome of our daily lives.

But very few people have ever heard of Moore's other, "Second" Law. And in the coming years it may prove to be even more important than the original. In fact, if the two laws continue forward as they have, there could be disaster looming for software giants like Microsoft.

The pace of hardware innovation, the central theme of Moore's Law, continues to surge forward while innovation for the accompanying software lags. It's probably one reason Microsoft has had so much trouble bringing it's much-delayed new operating system to market -- a development that has hamstrung computer-makers like Dell, not to mention the businesses and consumers who use their products.

Looking ahead, the innovation disparity could negatively impact not just software and computer-makers, but also the technology behind products like airplanes, cell phones, televisions and even MP3 players -- the things most consumers depend on every day.

Already, it is estimated by the industry analyst Venture Development Corp. that half of all new device projects now run behind schedule, with an average overrun of four months. That's going to get worse -- which means that the pace of innovative new products we've grown accustomed to (and depend upon in the case of medical diagnostic and treatment tools) is going to start slowing down… at the cost of comfort, entertainment and even health.

Moore's Law -- for our purposes, we'll call it Moore's First Law -- is taught these days to school kids. As you'll remember, it states that the performance (price, speed, size) of semiconductor chips doubles every 18 (these days, about 24) months. It was devised by Gordon Moore, co-founder of both Fairchild and Intel, in 1965.

The prediction Moore made in '65 not only proved correct, but, with a few modifications, continues to this day -- and the latest industry predictions are that it will go on to define the semiconductor industry for another 20 years or more. The "Law" has proven true not just for memory chips, but microprocessors as well -- and in almost every larger system in which these devices are used, from cell phones to personal computers, to even the computational areas (such as bioinformatics) of genetics.

It can be truly said that Moore's Law has been the defining material force for most of our lives, whether we know it or not.

Little known is the fact that the same paper in which Gordon Moore described his first Law, there is a short paragraph that, though it lacks the clarity and profundity of what came before, still effectively describes a second law. It goes like this: " …it may prove more economical to build large systems out of smaller functions, which are separately packaged and interconnected. The availability of large functions, combined with functional design and construction, should allow the manufacturer of large systems to design and construct a considerable variety of equipment both rapidly and economically."