This Week’s Clue: Liberate Moore’s Law

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 48 of
This Week’s Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since
March, 1997. It would be the issue of December 3.

Enjoy.

When this newsletter launched in 1997 it was called A Clue…to Internet Commerce.

As Internet Commerce became commerce, and as the process of doing business online became standardized, I began looking at other areas to cover and settled upon Moore’s Law.

At the start of this decade Moore’s Law was racing along on every front, and it seemed there was no way to stop it. So I wrote in my 2002 book. (That’s it to the right. The beard is whiter now, but I still have the suit and it fits.)
 

I was wrong. There was a force that could stop many elements of Moore’s Law in their tracks.

Politics.

Politics has prevented most Moore’s Law
benefits from reaching consumers and businesses in this decade. Instead these benefits have
been soaked-up by monopolists and the favored few. This has greatly
reduced economic growth. It is one of the great tragedies of this
decade, although I hesitate to use that phrase because there have been,
in fact, so many tragedies.

What I called Moore’s Law of Fiber has been locked up by a few
telcos, dissipated through spam and malware, so that the cost of a
consumer broadband account remains just what it was 5 years ago, and
speeds have not increased. The same forces have kept Moore’s Law from
operating in the area of copper, although it should have been possible
to gain exponential increases in the speed with which data moved over
copper throughout this period. Instead, Verizon is cutting copper lines while installing fiber to some homes, and preventing those customers from ever eluding its grip.

What I called Moore’s Law of Radios, embodied in the 802.11 or WiFi standards and the 801.16 or WiMax standard,
has been stopped by the same forces. While there’s now an 802.11n
standard which should allow routers to move data at 100 Mbps over a wireless
LAN link, it’s really a useless improvement since broadband links going outside your home are
barely 1/100th that speed. No new frequencies have been added to the
unlicensed spectrum available then, with the result that the practical
speed of a WiFi link may actually be slower today than in 2002, due to
interference from other routers.

WiMax has had an even more tragic fate. Basically it hasn’t even
been allowed a toehold. The release of a mobile version of the WiMax
standard caused interest in fixed applications to abate (when it could have provided back-haul bypassing the Bells for Wireless ISPs) , and it has
proven impossible to clear frequencies for the standard in any case. A
third wireless technology, UltraWideband,
which sends digital data under the "noise floor" of other frequencies,
has similarly been unable to gain traction due to objections from
existing license holders.  Existing systems have such strict power
limits that the data can’t get very far.

Moore’s Law of optical storage has been halted by another political
force, namely the internal politics among vendors.  Sony and Hitachi
were unwilling to agree on a shared standard for the next generation
beyond current DVDs so that we’re stuck with two non-selling standards,
BluRay and HD-DVD. Vendors have to stock two types of discs, and two
types of players, so prices haven’t fallen as they should have and the
market’s growth has been retarded. On top of that the content
industries have been reluctant to push content requiring these high-end
products, not wanting to further cannibalize rapidly-emptying movie
theaters. Everyone has been a loser.

Moore’s Law itself was meant to apply only to silicon chips, and in
some ways it stopped working this decade. As the distance between
circuit lines gets ever-smaller, the amount of interference between
them grows, and so does the heat they generate as they’re used. By 2004
chips were getting impossibly hot. Intel made the decision to bite
the bullet and switch to low-power designs, slowing improvements.
Fortunately we’ve since seen the rise of multi-core chips (which
generate partial Moore’s Law improvements through massively parallel
processing) and, more recently, the decision to switch from silicon to
a new metal-and-insulator technology that will finally solve the heat
problem and allow lines to start getting thinner again.

Only Moore’s Law of storage, which I used to discuss metal hard
drives, and the basic Moore’s Law technology applied to Random Access
Memory chips have survived unscathed. Thus this has been the Gadget Decade, as devices taking advantage of that storage have come to
dominate consumer electronics. The most prominent are the iPod and
stick memory.

The original iPod required a hard drive and held "just" 10 Gigabytes
of music. Today’s hard drive models hold as much as 80 GBytes, and
their proprietary software lets them maintain a price of about $2.50
per gigabyte, even though 80 GByte drives without iPod software can be had
for well under $100 today at any store.

It is in stick memory where we see the real Moore’s Law improvements
I was writing about five years ago. When these USB
chip-based memory devices were first coming out, replacing floppy
disk drives in 2003, we were thrilled to be able to get a 128
Mbyte model. Imagine, all the storage of 75 floppies on something you
could put on a keychain, something solid that would stay more stable
than the magnetic dust of a floppy disk (still called that even though
the later 3 1/2 inch models were solid plastic rather than the original
cardboard). Today it’s not uncommon to see 8 Gbyte sticks, and at the
same price as those older models. Apple has taken advantage of this with the iPod Nano, a chip-based version of the iPod that’s even smaller, more stable, and more durable, than the original model. It’s also more profitable.

That’s Moore’s Law in action. That’s the way it should be.

The point is the same improvements we’ve seen in stick memory should
be possible across the board, if we can get the politics out of the way
and just go forward.

To whet your appetite let me tell you what will be possible then.

• Imagine a world without clients, without visible servers, and without defined borders between client and network.
   
• Imagine thinking of all resources — all the libraries of the
  world, all the possible software applications, all the communities, all the stores, all
  the super-computing resources — available instantly, practically free,
  on whatever you happen to have.
   
• Imagine interfaces which start in the air and can become whatever
  you want them to be through electronic light — keyboards on an empty
  table, whiteboards hovering in mid-air.
   
• Imagine having access to any movie, any song, from anywhere, at any time, and at a price you don’t need to think twice about. 
   
• Imagine the border between being online and being offline disappearing.
   

Imagine all this, and more. Now imagine that what’s in shortest supply is imagination. Imagine that to dream is really to do.

With Moore’s Law liberated all today’s problems, starting with The War
Against Oil, can suddenly become manageable. We’ll be bound to one
another by invisible electronic threads, used to the very heights of
our abilities, free to create and earn what our creations are worth.

This world is tantalizingly close. The advances of Moore’s Law on all
fronts mean that, right now, it’s just waiting to be born. And Moore’s
Law isn’t going to stop here. Chips are going to get faster, using less
power. Fiber technology will continue to advance. Radios will extend
the reach of this network everywhere. Telephony and TV services, as
they exist today, will no longer exist.

There will just be your mind, and the connections you have, or can make,
with any and every other mind. There will be, in essence, a global
mind, consisting of all thinking minds everywhere, collaborating
together, fighting on the same side, in the same battle, trying to save
the world.

Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow. It will be here, better than before.