Some people aspire to immortality through art or politics, or by building a business empire. I’d love to have my name attached to a law.
Not a criminal law, mind you, but something like Moore’s Law — something that captures some fundamental insight clearly and simply.
Here’s my current top candidate:
Wilson’s Power Law of Software Intelligence.
(OK, so I may need to work on the name a bit…)
It’s sort of a kissing cousin to Moore’s law and to the parallel law that states that bandwidth is increasing in a similarly predictable fashion. (I’ve seen variants referred to as simply the bandwidth law, Nielsen’s Law after Jakob Nielson and Edholm’s law of bandwidth.)
My law states that software gets twice as smart and costs half as much every two years.
Every time I see a Google ad I think of it. And therein lies a story and a great example of the phenomenon…
Back in 2003, as we were signing on with Saxotech to use their Publicus CMS, we helped push them to strike a deal with a company called Applied Semantics. We were moving toward a taxonomy-based site, and we saw the consistent application of relevant meta-data as a potential problem. Applied Semantics had some great black-box technology that used god-only-knows-what kind of fuzzy logic and proprietary algorithms to automatically tag content. It was also crazy expensive — hundreds of thousands of dollars for an installation. Only a few big media companies were using it. Anyway, Saxotech and Applied Sematics struck a deal that would have allowed Saxotech to resell the service to customers like us.
But before we got our site up, Google bought Applied Semantics. Now the Applied Semantics technology is apparently part of what powers AdSense. (Go to appliedsemantics.com and you’ll land on an old Google page touting AdSense.)
So we never got to use it.
But seven years leter we can pump your content through any number of free automatic meta-data-tagging services like Calais. In just seven years, this hyper-intelligent software service has gone from crazy expensive to free.
The same dynamic seems to play out in other areas, as well, from virtualization to CMS systems to web design software.
And if it really holds up as a general rule, my law has huge implications, certainly for the developers of smart software, but also for the consumers. Especially for those of us lower down on business scale. What we see today in the hands of the big boys is likely to be within reach in two years and ubiquitous two years after that.
The problem with my law, unfortunately, is that it’s inherently hard to quantify software intelligence or complexity. And, yes, it’s true that I did just completely make up the two years bit above, as well as the doubling. Artistic license. But I think there’s something there. I’ll keep working on it. I’m not ready to give up on this shot at immortality yet.
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