> With every new generation of chips came new possibilities and new applications. The firms that developed those applications the fastest won. Initially, I was

> With every new generation of chips came new possibilities and new applications. The firms that developed those applications the fastest won. Initially, I was really disappointed in this article. Facebook, on the client-side, was 'possible' on a Pentium 4. Perhaps a III. Internet speeds where sufficient in the early 2000's, and MySpace was created a year before Facebook. We all know who won. I really had a hard time seeing what "chip generations" or "being first" had to do with any of it. Sure, powerful enough hardware is a pre-requisite. But... I couldn't see any correlation between generations of products / services and CPU power. In my mind, if there was a correlation to be had, it'd rather have been between said generations of products / services and, first internet speed, and then internet adoption. And Moore's law didn't have much to do with it. Then, it hit me. I was on the wrong time scale. He's talking decades. We're not looking at the 20 or even 30 years, but at the last 60 or 70 years. So, yes, he still misses the entire "internet tipping point", with the associated paradigm shift, that is probably just as important as his precious Moore's law. But he's also right on how it enabled the Mainframe -> PC -> Smartphone transitions. Although I still don't believe in the theory that being first matters that much. Who here remembers Microsoft's UMPCs? Or Intel's MIDs? Or the first third-party iPhone app? ... he does make a point. But I don't know what to make of the whole thing, really.