Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, pointed out in an interview that if you look at Moore's Theorem in turn, if an IT company sells the same products today and 18 months ago, its turnover will be halved. It calls it the antimoore theorem. The inverse Moore theorem is unfortunate for all IT companies, because an IT company spent the same effort, but only half of the previous revenue. The inverse Moore theorem forces all hardware equipment companies to keep up with the update speed specified by Moore's theorem. In fact, all hardware and equipment production plants work very hard. The following table lists the shares of the largest companies in various fields today and their maximum shares.
IBM: 82%.
Cisco: 1, 40%
Intel: 1, 33%
AMD: 30%
Marvels: 60%
HP: 70%
DELL: 1, 35%
Sun Microsystems: 10%
Motorola: 33%
In this regard, apart from IBM's not just hardware vendors, there are strong service and software revenues that can keep stocks at a high level, and other companies are far from their best levels. Today, the U.S. stock market is almost the highest point in history. This shows that hardware-based companies are difficult to make a living because of the influence of the inverse Moore theorem. If you are interested in reading the financial reports of these companies, you will find that these companies are developing at a high volatility. Once they fail to achieve the development speed specified by Moore's theorem, their profitability will plummet. Some companies may even have a disaster tolerance, such as SGI, which was booming 10 years ago. Even if they develop well today, they cannot guarantee that they will continue to make double progress in ten years. Therefore, investment guru Buffett never invests in these IT companies.
In fact, the positive side of the inverse Moore theorem is even more important. It facilitates qualitative advances in the field of science and technology and provides emerging companies with the possibility of survival and development. Like the development of all things, technological advances in the IT field are both quantitative and qualitative. For example, the same processor does not change much in the system architecture, but only improves the clock speed. This progress is the progress of quantitative change. When the number of processors increases from 16 to and then to, there is a small qualitative change. If nano-or biological technology can be used one day, a qualitative leap will be achieved, and the integration of Semiconductors will be improved by hundreds of times. In order to catch up with the growth rate of Moore's theorem prediction, quantitative variation alone is not enough. Every technology, within a few years, will be tapped into the potential of quantitative change. At this time, there must be a revolutionary creative invention. In the process of technological advances, new small companies cannot compete with old large companies, because the latter has unparalleled advantages in old technologies. For example, Nokia, born from a wooden factory, cannot compete with Motorola, the boss of traditional communication equipment, on older analog phones. However, in seizing the opportunity for qualitative changes, some small companies will do better than large companies, because they have no burdens and are more flexible than large companies. This is why many new technology companies have emerged in Silicon Valley.
Thirteen years ago, I first used a 2.4 kbps modem to access the Internet. Two years later, one of my colleagues, the founder of Dongfang Wangjing, the earliest Internet company in China, sent me a modem of the latest 14.4 kbps at that time, and I immediately felt that the speed was much faster. Because the digital telephone transmission rate is limited to 64 Kbps today, the modem transmission rate is up to 56 kbps, so by 1995, several of my colleagues predicted that the speed of accessing the Internet over a telephone line would not exceed this limit. If we stay at using the traditional method to speed up the modem, it does not take a few years for Moore's Theorem to apply. However, in 1990s, DSL technology was introduced to increase the data transmission speed on telephone lines by nearly two hundred times. Although DSL technology was first published by Bell's Core Laboratory, Professor John chafei of Stanford University turned it into practical technology. Professor Cha Fei became a senior member of IEEE (fellow) in his thirties and became an academician of the American Engineering Institute. In 1991, he started Amati, a small DSL Company, with several of his students. In 1997, he sold Amati to Texas Instruments (TI) at a high price of $0.4 billion ). This is a typical success story of Silicon Valley new technology companies. In the quantitative change phase of modem development, there will be no small companies like Amati, and even if they do, they will not be able to compete with Texas Instruments. However, once the modem speed is close to the original limit, emerging companies that can break this limit will have the opportunity to enter the stage of history.
The inverse Moore's theorem makes it impossible for the IT industry to pursue only quantitative changes like the oil industry or the aircraft manufacturing industry, and it must constantly seek revolutionary creative inventions. Any company that cannot meet Moore's theorem needs to develop technology 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 related to themselves and often buy small companies with revolutionary new technologies. They even make money to invest in small promising companies. Cisco is the most typical representative in this regard. It has bought many small companies that have invested in it over the past two decades.
At the same time, Moore's theorem makes it possible for new small companies to be at the same starting line as big companies in terms of developing new technologies. If a small company is successful, it can be acquired by a large company like Amati (this is a good thing for the founder, investors, and all employees ). They may even replace their status in their respective fields. For example, in terms of communication chip design, Broadcom and Marvell have largely replaced the original Lucent semiconductor department and even Intel's business in the relevant fields.
Of course, a company requires money, and no one can guarantee that investment in an emerging company will be profitable. Some investors who are willing to take risks and pursue high returns bring together the money and give it to professionals who know both financial management and technology, and give it to promising companies and individuals, this has gradually formed a risk investment mechanism in the United States. To build a high-tech company, you also need professionals who are both like-minded and willing to take risks. They are more interested in some companies than their relatively high salaries, so we have the option system for employees of high-tech companies.
Since its development, the IT industry has its own survival and development path. It is not shrinking because the price keeps falling, but is booming. From the top of the waves (Wu Jun) Related reading:
- [Sharing] Three Major theorem in the IT industry (I) -- Moore's Law)
- [Sharing] Three Major theorem in the IT industry (II) -- Andy and Bill's Law)
