Gates' Law

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Gates' Law is the observation that the speed of commercial software generally slows by fifty percent every 18 months. This can be for a variety of reasons: "featuritis", "code cruft", programmer laziness, or a management turnover whose design philosophy does not coincide with the previous manager.

Gates' Law comes out of the frustration that many users feel around the tendency of commercial software to slow down with each successive incremental version so that buying new software upgrades sounds like a reasonable idea. This "slowing down" may or may not be intentional.

It is inversely related to Moore's Law, which tends to focus on the speed of microprocessors increasing. Software, run on microprocessors, does not increase in speed -- it only decreases in speed.

It is attributed to Bill Gates, but Gates himself did not say it. Rather, the term is attributed to Gates based on the noted tendency of Microsoft products to slow down with each successive feature or patch.

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