A big part of the success of Microsoft was that every year, the chips our software ran on got faster and cheaper. They doubled in capability every 18 months under Moore's law.
I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, how not to make a mess of it, has not yet been met.
I'm a physicist, and we have something called Moore's Law, which says computer power doubles every 18 months. So every Christmas, we more or less assume that our toys and appliances are more or less twice as powerful as the previous Christmas.
Such is modern computing: everything simple is made too complicated because it's easy to fiddle with; everything complicated stays complicated because it's hard to fix.
I didn't realize how slow my four-year-old MacBook was until the web team wanted to start using it as the benchmark for a slow computer experience.
People tend to look at processing power as how to gauge a piece of hardware is powerful for us.
If you could utilize the resources of the end users' computers, you could do things much more efficiently.
Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.
The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.
At some point, Moore's law will break down.
