October 8th, 2009
Moore's Law of Software is the key to the cloud
In my new e-book on technology history, Moore’s Lore, I devote a special chapter to what I call Moore’s Law of Software.
Fact is there is no Moore’s Law of Software. Productivity has improved over the years, but arithmetically. Code is still being written, and tested, by hand. Software falls further behind hardware every year.
In his excellent Cloud Computing Rethink series over at C|Net, Cisco’s James Urquhart yesterday revealed a very important truth about the cloud that most executives and analysts have not fully understood.
This is all about programmer productivity.
Urquhart begins by describing what Forte Software tried to do with 4GL 15 years ago, offering it as a utopian past that cloud computing hopes to rediscover.
it starts this journey with an economic model that budgets can accommodate, and Urquhart then issues a call for better development tools. It’s the loyalty of software developers that must be won, and their shared endeavor can rebuild the 4GL utopia.
That shared endeavor is what connects cloud computing to open source. The same force that drives open source forward, developers sharing and improving tools, also drives the cloud, Urquhart writes.
It’s a brilliant insight.
That’s what the Amazon and Google brands bring to the party, software development environments that can be turned into profitable services quickly. As he explains:
How much more powerful is AWS with other developer-focused services, such as DevPay, Simple Queue Service, and Elastic Map Reduce? This attracts developers, which in turn attracts CPU/hrs and GB/hrs.
I keep thinking of one of these cloud guys doing the Ballmer dance. A Ballmer dance in the clouds?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Linux and Open Source via Email alerts or RSS.
| 10/08/09
