Moore’s Law: vision of the sixties, current reality

In September 1962, John F. Kennedy articulated his now famous vision that launched the American space program: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade.” These words set in motion a space race that culminated in Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk seven years later, on July 20, 1969. The full text of Kennedy’s ’62 speech reveals that his space challenge was part of a larger theme, namely, the impressive pace of technology. change that is used for the future. Kennedy was just one of several visions of scientific progress in the 1960s that would transform the world.

Another was a powerful prediction that completely changed the tech industry and its economy. In 1965, Gordon Moore, one of the founding fathers of the computer industry (co-founded Intel), created one of the best-known principles in the field of IT. Moore’s Law predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would double roughly every two years. Plus, it promised lower costs and more innovation as a direct result.

To maintain the status quo in today’s marketplace, it is imperative that business leaders develop proactive strategies for data and technology management based on Moore’s prediction, including: 1) Invest wisely: find the right strategic partners; 2) Start small, learn and get some early wins; 3) Organize for success; and 4) Think differently about the data.

For forty years, the industry has focused on the cost / productivity side of Moore’s prediction, mostly ignoring his subtler but also more powerful message about the accelerating pace of innovation. In hindsight, it’s not surprising that the pace of innovation and our growing appetite for technology have driven up overall IT costs. This is now creating pressure on operating plans and tension between CIOs and CFOs of corporations whose CEOs had expected IT costs to decline due to populist belief regarding the trajectory of the IT industry.

The availability of better technology and the insights it makes possible are what fuels our growing appetite for data. Today, companies collect more data than ever; They use powerful algorithms to find patterns in it to solve all kinds of real-life problems that were previously unsolvable. A 2008 study by International Data Corporation (IDC) projected that, in 2010, the world would create more than 1,200 exabytes of data (an exabyte is one quintillion bytes of data). This projection turned out to be true, forcing fast-moving consumer goods retailers and manufacturers to become increasingly proficient at finding new insights in large amounts of data. Historically, data was aggregated because the complexity of the queries required it, or because the disaggregated data did not exist or was too expensive.

Traditionally, companies have used data to understand what happened yesterday or today. To compete in the market, data is now used to predict what will happen in the future. To do so, companies are increasingly capturing disaggregated data in real time and analyzing information flows in real time, improving their ability to accurately project the future. In his books The Power of Now and The Power of Prediction, Vivek Ranadive describes an evolution over time towards event-driven business models where the need for real-time information is creating a “data explosion.” Ranadive reaffirms that CPU, memory and storage costs have decreased over the past 40 years as predicted by Moore, but the costs of storing and processing exponentially increasing amounts of data, and the need for smart people to analyze it, have increased as well. rhythm. This is the paradox of Moore’s law.

As companies consider strategies for managing and producing data, there are multiple needs to meet. At The Nielsen Company, our goal is to provide our clients with direct access to disaggregated data in real time, allowing them to better predict the future results of their business. We proactively invest in products and processes that truly differentiate our business and enable our customers to combine data in ways never before possible. Recognizing that no single company has the human or financial capital to do it alone, we foster strategic partnerships with world-class hardware and software companies to help us fulfill our vision. Our approach is to start small, learn fast, fail faster, make some profit, and apply the learnings. We ignore organizational boundaries, forming empowered teams that are rewarded for innovation, quality, and speed. Our culture embodies a relentless focus on the quality and timeliness of the data we provide to clients.

Moore’s Law foresaw an era of greater innovation, the details of which were understandably blurred in the 1960s. Today, innovation drives customers to demand faster and faster insights and to collect more and more data in real time. To meet this demand, IT departments have to spend more, despite lower component costs and higher performance. At the end of the day, Moore’s Law, which has been a catalyst for a major transformation of business, government and science, may require a reinterpretation.

When Kennedy articulated his vision for space in 1962, he recognized that the journey would not be without risk. He recognized that we were venturing into areas that were not well understood. Just three years later, before the microprocessor existed, Gordon Moore made an equally compelling prediction that would define the modern history of technology. Fast forward to today: Despite the visible accomplishments of the past forty years, the future of the American space program seems somewhat uncertain. The tech industry, which has also enjoyed four decades of unprecedented growth, thanks in part to Gordon Moore, is now venturing into uncharted territory as we begin to address the growing demand for real-time disaggregated data.