The computing industry progresses in two mostly independent cycles: financial and product cycles.
Tech product cycles are mutually reinforcing interactions between platforms and applications. New platforms enable new applications, which in turn make the new platforms more valuable, creating a positive feedback loop.
We are now entering an era in which processors and sensors are getting so small and cheap that there will be many more computers than there are people.
There are two reasons for this. One is the steady progress of the semiconductor industry over the past 50 years (Moore’s law). The second is what Chris Anderson calls “the peace dividend of the smartphone war”: the runaway success of smartphones led to massive investments in processors and sensors. If you disassemble a modern drone, VR headset, or IoT devices, you’ll find mostly smartphone components.
In the modern semiconductor era, the focus has shifted from standalone CPUs to bundles of specialized chips known as systems-on-a-chip.
