I quote from the Conclusions section of the actual paper linked by dang: "As miniaturization wanes, the silicon-fabrication improvements at the Bottom will no

I quote from the Conclusions section of the actual paper linked by dang: "As miniaturization wanes, the silicon-fabrication improvements at the Bottom will no longer provide the predictable, broad-based gains in computer performance that society has enjoyed for more than 50 years. Performance-engineering of software, development of algorithms, and hardware streamlining at the Top can continue to make computer applications faster in the post-Moore era, rivaling the gains accrued over many years by Moore’s law. Unlike the historical gains at the Bottom, however, the gains at the Top will be opportunistic, uneven, sporadic, and subject to diminishing returns as problems become better explored. But even where opportunities exist, it may be hard to exploit them if the necessary modifications to a component require compatibility with other components. Big components can allow their owners to capture the economic advantages from performance gains at the Top while minimizing external disruptions." (My emphasis on "economic advantages from performance gains.") Databases are still getting faster. You don't get a faster DB by buying a new server and then running a 10 year old version of SQL Server or PostgreSQL on it. Language runtimes are still getting faster. You don't get better Java or JavaScript performance by running a 10 year old release of the HotSpot JVM or V8. 3D renderers, video encoders, maximum flow solvers (one example examined in depth in the article): they're all getting faster over time at producing the same outputs from the same inputs. The key is incentives. There are probably people in your organization who care a lot if database operations slow down 10x. But practically nobody in your organization cares if Slack responds to key presses 10x slower or uses 100x as much memory as your favorite lightweight IRC client. (I'm trying to make a neutral observation here. Looking at it from 10,000 feet, I get annoyed when I see how much memory Slack takes on my own machine, but that annoyance wouldn't crack the top 20 priorities for things that would improve the productivity of the business I'm in.) The incentives problem is also why the Web seems slow. Browsers too are still getting faster. I used to run multiple browsers for testing and old Firefox and IE releases were actually much slower at rendering identical pages than current stable releases. But pages are getting heavier over time. Mostly it's not even a problem of people trying to make "too fancy" sites that are applications-in-a-browser. It's mostly analytics and advertising that makes everything painfully slow and battery-draining. I run a web site that has had the same ad-free, analytics-free, JS-light design since the early 2000s. It renders faster than ever on modern browsers. It's not modern browsers that are the problem -- it's the economic incentive to stuff scripts in a page until it is just this side of unbearable. For certain kinds of human-computer interaction, people will pay a lot to reduce latency. Competitive gamers will pay, for example. Sometimes people will invest a lot of effort to reduce memory footprint -- either because they're shaving a penny off of a million embedded devices or because they're bumping up against the memory you can fit in a 10 million dollar cluster. But the annoyances that dominate Wirth's Law discussions on HN -- why do we have to use Electron apps?! -- are unlikely to get fixed because few people are willing to pay for better.