Page’s Law: Why PCs get slower, not faster
You’ve probably heard of Moore’s Law, named after Gordon Moore of Intel. It states that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years. Thus PC circuits grow ever faster and more powerful year after year. So why is it that PC performance doesn’t seem to get much better? Vista is no faster than Windows XP or even slower and Windows 7 doesn’t promise any big improvement.
Enter Page’s Law, named after Larry Page of Google. This law states that software gets twice as slow every eighteen months. Harry McCracken comments:
Page’s Law is painfully true. It helps to explain why 2001-era PCs which ran Windows XP just fine are incapable of running Windows XP SP3 well, let alone Windows Vista. Actually, it explains, in part, why so many people feel the need to buy new computers every couple of years. We’re not buying faster machines so we can work faster–we’re buying faster machines to compensate for the speed lost to more bloated, inefficient software.
To illustrate how Windows has become increasingly bloated, the table below shows the minimum requirements for different versions of Windows.
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