Page’s Law? Try Wirth’s Law. Or Gates’s.

I hesitate to cite Valleywag as a news source, but I did read there that Sergey Brin is crediting fellow Google co-founder Larry Page with “Page’s Law“, the assertion that software gets twice as slow every 18 months, and thus outpaces Moore’s law.

Fortunately for Page, he is already assured of a solid entry in the history books. Because Page’s Law sounds suspiciously like Wirth’s law, pronounced by computer science titan Niklaus Wirth in 1995: “Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.” In fact, the more precise version cited by Page is known as Gates’s law – though I don’t think Bill Gates wants to take credit for it.