Software Productivity

From “What Happened to The Future” by Founders Fund

“the exponential growth of computational power (represented by Moore’s law), storage capacity (Kryder’s law), data transmission (e.g., Butters’ law), and other physical embodiments of computing is familiar. What is equally familiar is the somewhat slower rate of development in the utility of computers – software has gotten more powerful, but the rateof improvement doesn’t seem to be as swift as in hardware, though measuring improvements in software is somewhat impressionistic. Never theless, as anyone who has used a Bloomberg or Lexis can attest the amount of data we collect clearly outstrips out ability to make easy use of it. One way to look at this is to compare increases in computing power (as measured by the density of transistors on a chip) versus the change in productivity. Few technologies have ever improved as quickly and consistently as computer processors and yet the impact of computing is the (admittedly wildly onverdetermined) productivity statistics is difficult to detect. This suggests that however fast hardware imporves, software might be running behind. We certainly don’t have anything approaching a general artificial intelligence, a lack many futurists 30 years ago would have found rather surprising. Indeed, until fairly recently, it was difficult to find a stable operating system."

My thoughts: Perhaps the next great leap forward in productivity (for average consumers) lies in the development of new user interface technologies. Keyboard and mouse, despite their extremely long product lives, are not the perfect fit for our input needs. They are far from doing a good job (time, accuracy) at helping us getting what we need with a PC. Voice, touch, eyeball-tracking seem all promising but how quickly will these technologies be deployed at average consumers’ disposal with reasonable cost?