Moore's theorem brings a hope to all computer consumers. If I think computers are too expensive to afford today, I will be able to buy them at half the price in 18 months. If it is so simple, the sales of computers will not be able to go up. People who need to buy computers will wait for several more months. People who already have computers do not have the motivation to update their computers. This is also true for other IT products.
In fact, the sales of personal computers in the world have continued to grow over the past two decades. In 2004, Intel estimated that sales of PCs (including personal machines and small servers) in the world would increase by 2009 in five years, which is far higher than the economic growth by 60%. So what drives people to constantly update their hardware? The IT circle summarizes it into Andy-Bill's theorem, that is, Bill wants to take away what Andy gives (Bill takes away ).
Andy is former intel CEO Andy Grove, and Bill is the founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates. In the past two decades, Intel's processor speed has doubled every 18 months, and the computer memory and hard disk capacity have increased at a faster rate. However, Microsoft's operating systems and other applications are getting slower and slower. Therefore, although the current computer is one hundred times faster than a decade ago, the running of software is still similar to the previous one. In addition, in the past, the entire Windows operating system was only a few megabytes in size, and it now takes several gigabytes, so is the application software. Although the new software features a little better than the previous version, the added features are definitely not proportional to its size. Therefore, the number of applications that can be installed on a computer ten years ago is not much, although the disk capacity has increased by one thousand times. What's worse, users find that if they do not update their computers, many new software will not be available now, and connection to the Internet is also a problem. A car that can afford it a decade ago can still run.
At first glance, Microsoft is doing the right thing with everyone. In fact, gates and other vendors do not want to make the operating system and applications so big. It is understood that Gates himself said many times that he used to build basic with only a few dozen K jobs. You (Microsoft engineers) have to build a. net job with hundreds of megabytes, which can be optimized. Of course, we know that Microsoft's current. NET is much better than its basic functions two decades ago, but is it 10 thousand times better? I'm afraid no one thinks so. This shows that software developers are no longer as careful as they were two decades ago. We know that the basic interpreter was written in assembly language, so it could not be refined, or it could not run on the early IBM-PC. However, software engineers are required to use assembly language programming, which is extremely inefficient and the written program is poorly readable and does not meet the requirements of software engineering. Today, with sufficient hardware resources, software engineers focus more on their work efficiency and program standardization and readability. In addition, due to the increase in labor costs, in order to save the time for software engineers to write and tune the program, the programming language is getting better and better, while the efficiency is getting lower and lower. For example, today's Java is much less efficient than C ++, and C ++ is less efficient than C ++ two decades ago. Therefore, even for software with the same function, it is inevitable that today's hardware resources are more occupied than yesterday's.
Although users are very worried about the benefits of hardware upgrades brought about by new software, in the IT field, hardware vendors rely on software developers to use their hardware resources to survive. For example, as of the first half of last year, Microsoft's new operating system Vista was delayed, from Intel to devices such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell, to peripherals such as Marvell and Seagate, all sales are greatly affected because users do not need to update computers. The shares of these companies have fallen by 20% to 40% to varying degrees. At the end of last year, Microsoft finally went public on Vista, and of course Microsoft's own performance and shares were immediately improved. Intel, which had been depressed for more than a year, also reversed its decline at the beginning of this year, of course, both HP and Dell are also growing. This year, the shares of the three companies have all risen sharply. In the next few days, hard drive, memory, and other computer chip manufacturers are about to recover. Compared with the previous version of XP, Vista also provides many 20% features, but its memory usage is almost doubled, and the CPU usage doubles, unless it is a new machine, otherwise, Vista cannot be run. Of course, users can choose to use the original operating system XP, but soon, Microsoft and other software development vendors gradually reduced support for the XP system, thus forcing users to update machines.
We can see that the entire ecological chain of the personal computer industry is like this: software developers headed by Microsoft eat all the benefits of hardware upgrades, forcing users to update machines to make profits for companies like HP and Dell, these machine manufacturers then order new chips from half-guide manufacturers such as Intel, and purchase new peripherals from other factories such as Seagate. Among them, the profits of various companies have been correspondingly increased, and the stock has also increased. Each hardware semiconductor and peripheral company will invest in R & D of profits, speed up according to Moore's theorem, improve hardware performance, and prepare Microsoft for the next step to update software and eat hardware performance. Wall Street investors know that if Microsoft's development speed is slower than expected, and its software performance is poor, it will not be able to buy shares of companies such as Intel.
For users, buying a usable computer is similar to buying a usable computer ten years ago. If it is not affected by the "Made in China" effect, it will also increase slightly due to inflation. (Should this sentence be like this: if it is not the impact of the "Made in China" effect, for users, they will buy a usable computer and a usable computer ten years ago, the amount of money spent is almost the same, and even increases slightly due to inflation. The original meaning is that there is no difference with the original, because I feel cheap. The modified result is made in China and is now cheaper than the original one .) Of course, while Microsoft and other software developers eat most of the benefits of hardware improvement, they will more or less bring new things to users.
If the information revolution that began in the United States 20 years ago was based on personal computers and the Internet, then in Asia, mobile phones and mobile communications are the mainstream. Today, mobile phones generally have two processors: A Digital Signal Processor (DSP) and a general-purpose processor (CPU) similar to a microcomputer processor. Today, the computing performance of a mid-range mobile phone is as follows, personal computers more than five years ago, and the speed expected by the Moore's theorem is growing. Although no general operating system company similar to Microsoft exists in the mobile phone industry, the mobile phone manufacturers themselves, operators, and value-added service providers play Microsoft's role together. They are providing new services that consume more and more resources, and users have to update their mobile phones several years ago.
In this way, Andy-Bill's theorem turns computers, mobile phones, and other commodities that originally belonged to durable consumer goods into consumable goods, stimulating the development of the entire IT field. From the top of the waves (Wu Jun) Related Articles:
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