Chapter 25 Section 2 Andy and Bill's Law

Moore's theorem brings hope to all computer consumers. If I think the computer is too expensive to buy today, then I can buy it at half the price in eighteen months.If it were that simple, computer sales would never go up.People who needed to buy a computer would wait months, and those who already had a computer had no incentive to upgrade.The same is true for other IT products. In fact, the world's sales of personal microcomputers have continued to grow over the past two decades. In 2004, Intel Corporation estimated that within five years, that is, by 2009, the sales of PCs (including personal computers and small servers) in the world will increase by 60%, far higher than the economic growth.So, what motivates people to keep updating their hardware? The IT community sums it up into the Andy-Bill theorem, that is, Bill takes away what Andy gives (What Andy gives, Bill takes away).

Andy is former Intel CEO Andy Grove (Andy Grove), and Bill is Microsoft founder Bill Gates.Over the past two decades, the speed of Intel processors has doubled every eighteen months, and the capacity of computer memory and hard drives has grown at an even faster rate.However, application software such as Microsoft's operating system is getting slower and slower, and it is getting bigger and bigger.Therefore, although computers today are a hundred times faster than ten years ago, running software still feels the same as before.Moreover, in the past, the entire Windows operating system was only a dozen megabytes in size, but now it is several gigabytes, and the same is true for application software.Although the new software function is stronger than the previous version, the added function is definitely not proportional to its size.Therefore, a computer ten years ago could hold as many applications as it does now, even though the capacity of the hard disk has increased by a thousand times.What's worse, users find that if they don't update their computers, many new software can't be used now, and even connecting to the Internet is also a problem.A car that was affordable ten years ago can still run.

This phenomenon, at first glance, seems to be that Microsoft is doing right with everyone.In fact, Gates himself 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 the BASIC he made in the past was only a few tens of kilobytes, and you (Microsoft engineers) make a .NET that costs hundreds of megabytes, and it must be optimized.Of course, we know that Microsoft's current .NET is much more powerful than BASIC twenty years ago, but whether it is 10,000 times stronger, I am afraid no one thinks so.This shows that software developers are no longer as budget-minded as they were two decades ago.We know that the BASIC interpreter back then was written in assembly language, and it could not be more refined, otherwise it would not be able to run on the early IBM-PC.However, if software engineers are required to use assembly language programming, the work efficiency is extremely low, and the readability of the written programs is very poor, which does not meet the requirements of software engineering.Today, due to sufficient hardware resources, software engineers pay more attention to their work efficiency, standardization and readability of programs and so on.In addition, due to the increase in labor costs, in order to save the time of software engineers writing and adjusting programs, programming languages ​​are getting easier to use, 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 for software with the same function, it is unavoidable that today's software takes up more hardware resources than yesterday's software.

Although users are very annoyed that new software almost uses up all the benefits brought by hardware upgrades, in the IT field, various hardware manufacturers rely on software developers to use up their own hardware resources to survive.For example, until the first half of last year, because Microsoft's new operating system, Vista, was not available on the market for a long time, from Intel to HP, Dell and other complete machine manufacturers, to Marvell and Seagate and other peripheral manufacturers, all sales were greatly affected. impact because users have no need to update their computers.The stocks of these companies have fallen by 20% to 40% to varying degrees.At the end of last year, Microsoft’s long-awaited Vista was finally listed. Of course, Microsoft’s own performance and stock prices 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, HP and Dell also achieved growth at the same time. .Shares of all three companies have risen sharply this year.If nothing else, it's the turn of makers of hard drives, memory and other computer chips to start recovering. Compared with the previous version, XP, Vista also provides 20% more functions, but its memory usage is almost quadrupled, and the CPU usage is doubled. In this way, unless it is a new machine, Vista cannot be run.Of course, users can choose to use the original operating system XP, but soon, Microsoft and other software developers will gradually reduce their support for the XP system, thus forcing users to update their 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 brought by hardware upgrades, forcing users to update machines to benefit companies such as HP and Dell, and these complete machine production The factory then orders new chips from semiconductor factories like Intel, and at the same time purchases new peripherals from peripheral factories such as Seagate.In the middle of this, the profits of each company have been improved accordingly, and the stocks have also increased accordingly.Various hardware semiconductor and peripheral companies then invest their profits in research and development, and improve hardware performance according to the speed established by Moore's Theorem, in preparation 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 performance of the software is not good, then they must not buy stocks in companies such as Intel.

As far as users are concerned, buying a usable computer now costs about the same as buying a usable computer ten years ago. There is improvement. (Should this sentence be like this: If it is not for the influence of the "Made in China" effect, for users, the money spent on buying a computer that can be used now and buying a computer that can be used at that time ten years ago will be different. It is almost the same, and even slightly increased due to inflation. The original meaning is that there is no difference from the original, because I feel that it is cheaper. The revised result is because it is made in China, and it is now cheaper than before.) Of course However, while Microsoft and other software developers eat most of the benefits of hardware improvements, they will more or less bring some new things to users.

If in the United States, the information revolution that started 20 years ago was based on personal computers and the Internet, then in Asia, the mainstream is mobile phones and mobile communications.Today's mobile phones generally have two processors, a digital signal processor (DSP) and a general-purpose processing unit (CPU) similar to a microcomputer processor. Today, the computing performance of a mid-range mobile phone exceeds that of a personal microcomputer five years ago. , but also growing at the rate predicted by Moore's theorem.Although there is no general-purpose operating system company like Microsoft in the mobile phone industry, mobile phone manufacturers themselves, operators and value-added service providers together play the role of Microsoft.They are providing new but increasingly resource-intensive services, forcing users to update their phones every few years.

In this way, the Andy-Beer theorem turned computers, mobile phones and other commodities that were originally consumer durables into consumable commodities, stimulating the development of the entire IT field.