Moore's Law has largely been sustained because we've just been been getting as much as we can out of one overarching idea (silicon and transistors), and increme

Moore's Law has largely been sustained because we've just been been getting as much as we can out of one overarching idea (silicon and transistors), and incremental progress along that direction is inevitable when there's no stimulus to force exploration of a completely new direction altogether. Like olefoo said, software is an entirely different game. In addition to the above point, the relative progress of software is also impeded by the fact that it has to cater to millions of different applications in the real world and perform under different constraints in each one. When it covers such a broad range of application, its hard to really see what the "best way" is,and there probably isn't one. Final (and most important IMO) point - there's no way to simply characterize the progress of software into one number and see if it follows Moore's law. Given that the open source movement, social networking, sites based on user-generated content, and tons of other things have all been created in the last decade, we may not be doing that bad.