Me: Computers are getting faster

Daughter: Ours?

Me: No, new computers

Daughter: Oh…

The truth of the matter is that we can spend all the time we want worrying about the ‘coming software crisis’ but really the vast majority of computers are not getting any faster. The frustration of the average user is clearly evident when they complain about the speed of their machine and that they just can’t run the current software. What’s amazing is how fast these average computers really are, so fast that it’s hard for us to really get our heads around that speed at the hardware level (can you really visualize a CPU doing 400 MFLOPS at the instruction level?).

As an industry we need to be much more conscious of our design decisions. We should concentrate on listening to our customers rather than relying on the prevailing wisdom of Moore’s Law to help us along. Our customers don’t care about .NET or latest-greatest-programming-language-x or multi-core processors, they just want the programs to be stable, fast and functional.

There’s a humorous story floating around Microsoft that Bill Gates would occasionally show up to ridicule some bloated feature or another saying something along the lines of, “You’re an idiot, I fit a full BASIC implementation into 4K“. Maybe it’s a myth from the early Microsoft days but I always liked that story.