Andy and Bill's law is a statement that new software will always consume any increase in computing power that new hardware can provide. The law originates from a humorous one-liner told in the 1990s during computing conferences: "what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away." The phrase is a riff upon the business strategies of former
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
CEO
Andy Grove
Andrew Stephen Grove (born András István Gróf; 2 September 193621 March 2016) was a Hungarian-American businessman and engineer who served as the third CEO of Intel Corporation. He escaped from Communist-controlled Hungary at the age of 20 ...
, and former CEO of
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...
,
Bill Gates
William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...
. Intel and Microsoft had entered into a lucrative partnership in the 1980s through to the 1990s, and the standard
chipsets
In a computer system, a chipset is a set of electronic components in one or more integrated circuits known as a "Data Flow Management System" that manages the data flow between the processor, memory and peripherals. It is usually found on the mo ...
in Microsoft
Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...
were Intel brand. Despite the profit Intel gained from the deal, Grove felt that Gates wasn't making full use of the powerful capabilities of Intel chips, and that he was in fact refusing to upgrade his software to achieve optimum hardware performance.
Grove's frustration with the dominance of Microsoft software over Intel hardware became public, which spawned the humorous catchphrase; and, later, the law.
See also
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Jevons paradox
In economics, the Jevons paradox (; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of ...
*
Moore's law
*
Wirth%27s law
Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
The adage is named after Niklaus Wirth, a computer scientist who discussed it in his 1995 article "A Plea ...
References
Computer architecture statements
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