Perhaps When a Talking Head Says It They Will Believe

When people at Google speak, people tend to listen. Let’s certainly hope so. Sergey Brin was delivering a speech at a Google I/O developer conference, and spoke the words that, if Microsoft had its way, would have caused him to combust spontaneously.

It’s called Page’s Law, after Larry Page, Brin’s partner. He states that software gets twice as slow every eighteen months.  This is not new, however, I have said for years that software expands to use up any extra processor power delivered by new designs, so I suppose you could say that it is a corollary to that.

Harry McCracken in Technologizer says -

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 lot to more bloated, inefficient software.

When I got into computers, circa 1978, many machines had 4KB of RAM (one one-millionth of the capacity of a system today with 4GB). 16KB was considered generous. 48KB was downright sinful. And the TRS-80s we used at school ran at a rip-roaring 1.77-MHz.

Result: Just about anyone who wrote software for any personal computer of the time wrote extremely efficient code–you pretty much didn’t have the option of not being maniacally miserly with bytes and processing cycles. I’ve often thought that if today’s programmers were as diligent as those 1970s hackers, there essentially wouldn’t be such a thing as a slow PC today, or one that ran out of memory.

Among the unexpected benefits of the migration of applications from local machines to the Web is this: Programmers once again have to deal with severely constrained resources. There’s no question that an app like Zoho Writer does Microsoft Word-like things in a more efficient way. I’m also heartened by the fact that the browser wars have lately turned into a speed competition. But I still think we’d get even leaner code if developers pretended they were writing for, say, a Vic-20 with 3.5KB of available RAM and a 1-MHz 6502 CPU.

There, two well-known people have spoken what I’ve been saying for some time, yet when I say it, I am accused of early Alzheimer’s (I’m not close to that old, having barely cracked midlife). I do, however, go back to the time of those excruciatingly slow computers (by today’s standards) and yet people were able to get real work done – amazing!

The sad thing about this, and about Microsoft in specific, is that the advent of the dynamic linked library was supposed to have alleviated all this. DLLs were supposed to be used, by being pulled quickly into memory, and then dismissed, freeing up memory for new tasks, and other DLLs, to be used. (I won’t even mention speed gained by coding critical parts of programs in assembler, but today that’s a bad word, C++ is the key, or perhaps Java – that is the party line on this.) Sadly, it was never quite as seamless as Microsoft would have liked,  and the absolute nadir of the concept occurred with the introduction of Vista. Though partially abated by Windows 7, it is this same lack of seamless speed that plagues Windows today, and there seems to be no solution, as Microsoft doesn’t want to change, preferring instead to follow Page’s Law.

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What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn’t much better than tedious disease.     - George Dennison Prentice