Creative Destruction is a very powerful thing, and if you're in the Destruction part of the equation it may be painful for a while.
I do like his analogy in the article, but I want to make one correction. This is a widely spread myth about Moore's law. Here are the facts:
- Doubling occurs approximately every two years, not 1.5 years
- What doubles is the amount of transistors you can inexpensively manufacture on the same area, NOT COMPUTING POWER
In fact, every two years we roughly double density, but we only increase computational power 40%.
This is important because it changes his timeframe a bit.
Oh, by the way, hardware is useless without software. Remember the phrase "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away?" We're getting to the point where new software on client machines (laptop/desktop) often runs faster, or requires fewer resources, on the same exact hardware. (Phones and tablets are obviously not there yet). The big requirements for more computation are in the server land; servers, datacenters, storage, analytics, etc etc etc. That all trickles down to client eventually, but there's a delay of nearly a decade between what happens in servers and what happens in your pocket.
