The IT industry has three known laws:
1.moore's law
The general idea of this law is that the technology of hardware or equipment manufacturers in the IT industry doubles every eighteen months, which means that the prices of products related to related technologies will drop by half every eighteen months.
2. Andy and Bill's Law (Andy-Bill theorem)
Although the speed of the processor, the capacity of the memory and the hard disk continue to grow in accordance with Moore’s Law, we find that some new software or new systems have similar functions than a few years ago, but occupy more space and consume more resources than It was much bigger before.
This is the so-called "WhatAndy gives, Bill takes away".
Software developers are no longer as savvy as they were twenty years ago. We know that the BASIC interpreter of the year was written in assembly language and was so refined that it could not be refined, otherwise it would not run at all on the early IBM-PC. However, software engineers are required to use assembly language to program, the work efficiency is extremely low, and the written programs are very readable and do not meet the requirements of software engineering. Today, with sufficient hardware resources, software engineers pay more attention to their work efficiency, program standardization and readability, etc. In addition, due to the increase in labor costs, in order to save the time for software engineers to write and adjust programs, programming languages are getting better and better, but at the same time, the efficiency is getting lower and lower. For example, Java today is much less efficient than C++, and C++ is less efficient than C twenty years ago. Therefore, even with software with the same function, it is inevitable that today's hardware resources are more occupied than yesterday's. Although users are very annoyed by the new software that almost all the benefits of hardware upgrades have been used up, in the IT field, various hardware manufacturers rely on software developers to use up their own hardware resources to survive.
The entire ecological chain of the personal computer industry is like this: software developers headed by Microsoft eat up all the benefits of hardware upgrades, forcing users to update their machines to benefit companies such as HP and Dell, and these complete machine manufacturers then turn to Intel. Semiconductor factories in China place orders for new chips and purchase new peripherals from peripheral manufacturers such as Seagate. In the meantime, the profits of each company have been correspondingly improved, and the stocks have also increased. Each hardware semiconductor and peripheral company invests profits in research and development, and improves hardware performance in accordance with the speed established by Moore's Theorem to prepare for Microsoft's next software update and eating up hardware performance. Investors on Wall Street know that if Microsoft's development speed is slower than expected and the software's performance is not good, then it must not buy shares of companies such as Intel.
3. Reverse Moore's Law (Reverse Moore's Law) If you look at Moore's Law in reverse,
if an IT company sells the same number of products today and 18 months ago, its turnover will be cut by half. IT circles call it the anti-Moore's theorem. Anti-Moore's theorem is very sad for all IT companies, because an IT company spends the same labor but only gets half of its previous income.
Anti-Moore's theorem forces all hardware equipment companies to keep up with the update speed stipulated by Moore's theorem. In fact, all hardware and equipment manufacturers live very hard.
In fact, the positive side of Anti-Moore's Theorem is more important. It promotes qualitative progress in the field of science and technology, and provides the possibility of survival and development for emerging companies.
The anti-Moore's theorem makes it impossible for the IT industry to pursue only quantitative changes like the petroleum industry or the aircraft industry, but must constantly look for revolutionary inventions. Because any company whose technological development cannot keep up with the requirements of Moore's Theorem will be eliminated in a few years. Large companies, in addition to maintaining high R&D investment, must always pay attention to the development of new technologies around them and their own, and often acquire small companies with revolutionary new technologies. They even invested in some promising small companies.
In this regard, the most typical representative is Cisco, which has bought back many small companies that it has invested in in the past two decades.
These three theorems complement each other and influence each other, and for now, their influence rises instead of decreasing. Take the example closest to our daily life to explain:
* For games from ten years ago, such as cf, Contra, cs, king of fighters, etc., the quality of the game experience is ridiculously inferior compared to today, but it is questionable whether the computer at that time can drive these games. Nowadays, there are so many kinds of games with beautiful picture quality, but ordinary cheap personal computers can download and run.
The desktop computers that once flooded the market are bulky and often fail, running slowly and are time-consuming and labor-intensive. But now a small smart phone can handle most work reports.
And once the dominant Apple company, it lost to Windows in the competition of computer systems, and now it has encountered Android that is equal to it in the competition of mobile phones.
Such phenomena are the reality of Moore's Law and other laws. These three laws are not only a summary of past experience, but also have indelible educational significance for the development of the current IT industry. They are equivalent to the cornerstone of guiding IT companies. . *