I hesitate to cite Valleywag as a news source, but I did read there that Sergey Brin is crediting fellow Google co-founder Larry Page with “Page’s Law“, the assertion that software gets twice as slow every 18 months, and thus outpaces Moore’s law.
Fortunately for Page, he is already assured of a solid entry in the history books. Because Page’s Law sounds suspiciously like Wirth’s law, pronounced by computer science titan Niklaus Wirth in 1995: “Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.” In fact, the more precise version cited by Page is known as Gates’s law–though I don’t think Bill Gates want to take credit for it.
The Noisy Channel 
10 replies on “Page’s Law? Try Wirth’s Law. Or Gates’s.”
Good catch. I covered Wirth’s Law extensively in Dreaming in Code. I would think Sergey would know about it — particularly since Google’s own software practice is a pretty good counterexample (Google’s search engine hasn’t slowed down appreciably over the years!).
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Indeed, it would have been much more biting to refer to it as Gates’s Law–though perhaps a bit too catty. 🙂
By the way, welcome to The Noisy Channel! I appreciate your engaging me on my home turf re: newspapers charging for content. It’s not everyday I see a co-founder of Salon in these parts!
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Don’t forget May’s law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)
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Jamie, nice catch–sorry I missed that one!
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Daniel; I actually think David’s law pre-dates Wirth’s. Unfortunately I do not know of any citation for it (nor does the Wikipedia article author).
Oh well
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I can’t find anything on David’s Law earlier than 2005, e.g., http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~dave/moore.pdf. That’s a decade later than the date cited for Wirth’s Law.
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He actually coined the term a lot longer before that (I was lectured by him). I’ll try find out
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That’s why I’d LOVE to get a NEW computer, running Windows XP. Take new hardware and pair with OLD software and you feel like a king. Most software like SnagIt 9 appear to jump the shark at some point. I reverted to SnagIt 8.
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My wife is about to get a netbook, and that’s probably what she’ll do. So we’d better hurry up and decide whose law it is! I’ll tentatively accept it as David’s.
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“Google’s search engine hasn’t slowed down appreciably over the years!”
This is totally false. Try using Google over dial-up, it’s unbearably slow. You just don’t notice over broadband.
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