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Trend rising from the ashes of Moore'Law

Chances are if you work in the technology industry you will have heard of Moore’s law. For those that haven’t, in a nutshell, it is a theory named after Intel co-founder George Moore in 1965 who observed that computing power for the world doubles every two years— and the outcome; the price of computing would drop precipitately. Moore’s Law held true for almost 50 years. Think of mainframe computing power now to the average smart phone; what once cost millions is now down to just a couple of hundred pounds.

There has been much debate over the last few years around the death of Moore’s law, at least in terms of silicon-based computing. Researchers at AMD believe that the end is nigh and the law only has 10 years left of life.

While Moore’s Law may be close to running its course, it has already cemented its place in the history books for the information revolution and modern computing. The question is now what will be the next technology ‘law’ to join these pages.

From pounds to pence

Moore’s Law primarily focused on hardware computing, however, in the shadows of this much publicised theory another trend has been developing. The price of software applications has plummeted, while the functionality and quality has grown exponentially. If you think about it, you can download a finance application to your smart phone for a measly 99p that just a couple of years ago would have cost thousands of pounds, and would have required extensive back-end hardware support to run.

There are a number of reasons why this pattern is emerging, trends like open source software, easy-to-use development tools, reduced computing costs and cloud computing are making it easy for developers to quickly build premier software applications. This negates the need for highly skilled computing scientists with long development cycles, which previously kept the prices high. This growing trend also allows businesses to quickly and easily customise off the shelf software packages to fit their unique challenges or to address a bespoke need, which in the past would have required a lengthy process and therefore a heavy cost.

The consequences of all this means that surprisingly today in our hyper-inflationary world, software is one commodity that is actually deflationary.

The evolution of the software app market

Organisations use software applications to automate a large number of their key business processes including manufacturing, support services, finances and customer relationship management (collectively ERP applications). A decade ago, the license, implementation, ongoing maintenance and helpdesk support fees could total anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of pounds.

The purchasing dynamic has changed completely for businesses, now an enterprise can find software as robust, and perhaps even more agile, for a few thousand pounds a year. Smaller, more responsive players in the software development market, offering software packages in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, eliminate the longwinded and complex process of procurement, integration and testing. This move ushers in a new era of ‘try before you buy’, enabling a greater level of flexibility and freedom to experiment, and in turn driving the costs down even further.

Also, between app stores like the Apple App Store, Google Marketplace and Google Play, there are millions of cloud-based and mobile business applications that range in price from a couple of quid to a few hundred pounds. These app stores empower business owners to select software applications that they previously didn’t have access to, unchaining them from the big vendors that they would have been at the mercy of in the past. This added choice frees businesses from having to invest in heavy, clunky, over-featured solutions, that don’t address the bespoke needs of the company.

I am certain that like Moore’s Law, this trend will continue for some time, although you could argue that as it stands now, the demise of the software app equivalent could be a lot more dramatic!

Raj Sabhlok is the president of Zoho Corp., which is the parent company of Zoho.com and ManageEngine. Follow him @rajsabhlok.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Raj Sabhlok .