Today in 1965, Gordon E. Moore published “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits” in Electronics, predicting a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit. This constant rate of increase became to be known as “Moore’s Law.”
Moore’s Law is not about physics, not even about economics. And it is much more than a self-fulfilling prophecy guiding an industry as it is generally perceived to be. Rather, Moore’s Law is a marketing slogan promoting a set of specific innovations and the embodiment of a specific set of social norms guiding an economic activity. Moore’s Law is the call-to-arms of an American entrepreneur, selling his ambition, risk-taking, and unshaken belief in himself, his colleagues, and the unlimited opportunities offered by his country. In 2015, I predicted that Moore’s Law will endure as long as the American entrepreneurial spirit will endure.
Like other marketing slogans—and unlike the laws of physics—Moore’s Law was revised to fit with evolving market realities. In a 2006 article (subscription required) in the IEEE Annuals of the History of Computing, Ethan Mollick has convincingly showed that the “law” and the prediction were adjusted periodically in response to changing competitive conditions (e.g., the rise of the Japanese semiconductor industry): “The semiconductor industry has undergone dramatic transformations over the past 40 years, rendering irrelevant many of the original assumptions embodied in Moore’s Law. These changes in the nature of the industry have coincided with periodic revisions of the law, so that when the semiconductor market evolved, the law evolved with it.”
Moore’s Law is the most widely known example we have of the ability of successful entrepreneurs to articulate a compelling vision that motivates investors, employees, and customers to join forces with them. Another illustration of the power of a great tag line that looks and sounds like a law of nature, is what has been popularized (by George Gilder) in the 1990s as “Metcalfe’s Law.”
In 1983, 3Com’s co-founder Bob Metcalfe answered his sales force’s need to convince customers that they should buy additional $1,000 Ethernet cards by devising a mathematical formulation, claiming that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of “compatibly communicating devices.” Metcalfe says that he used his law-like formulation to “convince early Ethernet adopters to try LANs [Local Area Networks] large enough to exhibit network effects,” in effect promising them that the value of their investment will grow as more people get connected to the office network.
Metcalfe Law encapsulates a brilliant marketing concept, engineered to get early adopters—and more important, their accountants—over the difficulty of calculating the ROI for a new, expensive, unproven technology. It provided the ultimate promise: This technology gets more “valuable” the more you invest in it.
Moore’s and Metcalfe’s “laws” are two prominent examples of the remarkable marriage of engineering and marketing ingenuity that has made so many American entrepreneurs successful. But the most successful marketing and branding campaign invented by an engineer is the one that has been promoting “artificial intelligence” since 1955.