I agree the problem is in the definition of the phrase. But taking it a step further, it may be that this is not an apt comparison to begin with. "Moore's Law f

I agree the problem is in the definition of the phrase. But taking it a step further, it may be that this is not an apt comparison to begin with. "Moore's Law for Software" It sounds witty and fantastic, and I had this tingly "Ooh, aah, interesting point" feeling when I first read it, but it's hiding a lot underneath all that brevity. We can look at Moore's law and get and easy metric: The layman may know it as "The speed of computers doubles every X years" (where X changes depending on the person retelling it). Those more familiar know it as "The number of transistors we can cram into the same space doubles every 18 months." We get something concrete to look for, something empirical to measure: Transistors. With software it's far less clear not only what we're measuring, but how we measure it. And even if we ("we" being necessarily a mere subset of software users) settle on a measurement, it's almost certain that any one measurement will not matter to all people in the same ways. Moore's law for Software. Does that mean Moore's law for the usefulness of Software to its end users? Does it mean efficiency of achieving some result? Does it mean the capacity of the software to be intuitive? Enjoyable? It's ability to spawn a series of companies that create new jobs? We might as well be in a social sciences seminar debating definitions of "utility". Put into an example: A redesigned UI for an internal tool at a major corporation could lead to hundreds of people doing their jobs twice as fast. Maybe even thousands. That's Moore's Law-esque doubling, but is it really what we want to measure? If it is, where did it come from, and how do we continue to reproduce that improvement in the manner that the word "law" would require? I won't try and go any further down this rabbit hole, but I just wanted to elaborate a bit on the points you opened up.