Moore's Law

Gordon Moore's 1965 observation that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles approximately every two years, producing exponential growth in computing power at declining cost. For over 50 years, this held remarkably stable, driving the entire information technology revolution. Moore's Law isn't a physical law but a self-fulfilling economic prediction: the industry organized around achieving it, which made it happen. As a mental model, it represents the broader phenomenon of exponential technological improvement—and the human inability to intuit exponential growth, which causes consistent underestimation of technological change.

When to use it

When making long-term technology investment decisions; when current technological limitations feel permanent (they probably aren't); when evaluating whether a technology-dependent opportunity is 'too early' (it probably is, but less than you think); when calibrating expectations about technology-driven change.

How it can help

Use Moore's Law as a proxy for exponential thinking in technology-driven domains. What's expensive and clunky today will be cheap and elegant in 5-10 years. What seems impossible today may be trivial in a decade. Strategic implications: don't optimize for today's technology constraints—they'll relax exponentially. Build platforms and architectures that can absorb dramatic improvements in underlying technology. The most common strategic error in technology: assuming today's limitations are permanent when they're actually temporary barriers on an exponential curve.