[HN Gopher] Norvig's Law (2002)
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Norvig's Law (2002)
Author : saikatsg
Score : 99 points
Date : 2022-10-02 13:38 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (norvig.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (norvig.com)
| smcin wrote:
| Nonsense. This observation is unworthy of a genius like Norvig
| and anyway it's not even generally true: _it 's all a matter of
| perspective, and the associated revenue model (purchase vs.
| subscription model)_. _Whether the glass is half-full or empty
| depends entirely on perspective:_ whether I 'm looking at this as
| a seller of a device (e.g. smartphone/PC/laptop/tablet) then
| maybe I only think of once-off purchases. But if I'm Microsoft
| (software suite/subscription) or Adobe or Netflix or Apple
| iTunes, then high penetration of my target market is great, it
| gives me recurring sales/subscriptions(/users on a social
| network, to serve ads to). If I'm an independent app developer, I
| love that Android has high penetration, or else that iOS has
| market segment of users with high propensity to spend on both app
| and IAP; but whatever I do, in the 2020s I don't target Microsoft
| Phone/ Nokia/ Blackberry/ PalmOS (RIP). Maybe HarmonyOS. (Also,
| high penetration and market share have a tertiary effect of
| squashing potential competition by siphoning revenues that might
| go to competitors. Anyone remember last.fm [0]? remember how
| Microsoft destroyed RealNetworks's business model [1] by giving
| away streaming-media server software for free? ("According to
| some accounts, in 2000 more than 85% of streaming content on the
| Internet was in the Real format.")
|
| We will see the rebuttal of Norvig's Law when Netflix launches
| its ad-supported tiers. Or we saw it during 2020-2021/Covid, when
| Amazon aggressively pushed its discounted Prime to fixed-/low-
| income EBT/Medicaid/other government assistance recipients (at
| least in the US) [2,3]
|
| With all due respect to Norvig (and if you've read his AI book or
| ever seen him speak in person, he's undilutedly brilliant, and
| also humble), he should get out there and try to sell a
| subscription-based device/service. Lemonade-Stand-for-web3.0, if
| you will... "customer acquisition" is not a dirty phrase.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last.fm
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNetworks#History
|
| [2]
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
|
| [3] https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/07/1604211/
| chrisoverzero wrote:
| I'm running a subscription-based service, but I've stalled at
| 57% market penetration. Can you give me some advice on how I
| can _double_ my market penetration from this point?
|
| Remember, what I'm looking for is 114% market penetration. Any
| help you can provide will be gratefully appreciated.
| [deleted]
| harry8 wrote:
| Sell 2+ subs to every customer, eg separate phone from car
| from desktop.
|
| I will not make jokes involving the word double and shame on
| you if you thought of it too.
|
| Definitions are boring, no growth is limitless by entropy.
| fsckboy wrote:
| I'm willing to help you, but only if you want it done
| _yesterday_.
| bombcar wrote:
| Bundle your subscription with things that some or most of
| your customers already have - but make it impossible to
| migrate data from existing accounts.
|
| So Prime gives them whatever it is, but they can't cancel
| their current subscription.
|
| Win-win evil.
| [deleted]
| kragen wrote:
| Norvig said that:
|
| > _To be clear, it all depends on what you count. If you 're
| counting units sold, you can double your count by selling
| everyone 1 unit, then 2, then 4, etc. (In Finland I understand
| that cell phone usage is above 1 per capita, but still
| growing.) If you're counting the total number of households
| that own the product, you can double your count by doubling the
| population, or by convincing everyone to divorce and become two
| households. But if you're counting percentage of people (or
| households), there's just no more doubling after you pass 50%._
| greenbit wrote:
| Well, maybe you can't double what you've got, but one way to
| measure past the 50% mark would be to try to halve what remains
| on the table.
| badrabbit wrote:
| This sounds like a bell curve.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Well, one use to have a family computer, now we have 4... 7 if
| you count ipads. same with phones.
| lupire wrote:
| This is covered in the OP.
| leoh wrote:
| Link to Proebsting's law
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20000824013718/http://www.resear...
| svat wrote:
| (2002), or maybe (2001) or (2000) or (1999): The Wayback
| Machine's earliest archive of this page is from June 2002:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20020603071812/https://norvig.co...
| and the page itself mentions July 1999, so this page is from some
| time in 1999-2002.
| jwilk wrote:
| According to the archived response headers, it was modified in
| April 2002: $ curl -s -I 'https://web.archive.o
| rg/web/20020603071812/https://norvig.com/norvigs-law.html' |
| grep -E '^x-archive-orig-.* [0-9]{4} ' x-archive-orig-
| date: Mon, 03 Jun 2002 07:18:15 GMT x-archive-orig-last-
| modified: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 07:27:36 GMT
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we'll put 2002 above. Thanks!
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Norvig 's Law_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7491767 -
| March 2014 (13 comments)
|
| _Norvig 's Law_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=317170 -
| Sept 2008 (14 comments)
|
| _Norvig 's Law: Any technology that surpasses 50% penetration
| will never double again _ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36047 - July 2007 (4
| comments)
| jfdi wrote:
| I'm sure I'm missing something deeper here: isn't it tautological
| that something that is at >50% can't double again?
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| It seems to be intended just as a common-sense reminder that
| fast growth has to eventually slow/stop due to market
| saturation.
|
| It's not strictly true though since the market itself can grow
| so your sales could still double or more from a level that had
| represented 50% of the market at some time in the past.
| lupire wrote:
| Everything true is tautological in some context.
| fdr wrote:
| It's a joke. Even someone as well known as Peter Norvig is
| unlikely to be so gauche as to name a "law" after himself
| except tongue in cheek.
| kjhughes wrote:
| Those who insist on using percentages greater than 100%
| hyperbolically when wishing to indicate "even more" would
| disagree with Norvig's Law.
|
| Maybe if they gave it 150%, they could see Norvig's reasoning. It
| may take more than that, though -- maybe _exponentially_ more.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Maybe if they gave it 150%, they could see Norvig's
| reasoning. It may take more than that, though -- maybe
| _exponentially_ more.
|
| I hope you'll permit me explicitly to single out your mocking
| invocation of my bete noire. I think that _most_ non-technical
| authors just confuse 'exponential' with 'super-linear' (if
| they think even that quantitatively) ... but I sometimes worry
| that even the somewhat more technically minded think that
| 'exponential' just means 'has an exponent', and so think that
| quadratic growth is exponential, y'know, because there's an
| exponent of 2.
| lupire wrote:
| For those who don't know:
|
| time*n is linear in time and n, but ther symmetry stops
| there.
|
| time^n is *geometric* (or polynomial) growth over time.
|
| n^time is exponential in time.
|
| time! (factorial) doesn't have a common name that I know. It
| is (in the long run) faster than any exponential growth.
| system2 wrote:
| Is this meant to be a joke or I am missing something here?
| lupire wrote:
| What don't you understand?
| Nokinside wrote:
| There is probably some discussion inside Google that prompted
| this.
|
| "We should aim to double our market share!"
| tgflynn wrote:
| > Less familiar are the more pessimistic laws, such as
| Proebsting's law, which states that compiler research has led to
| a doubling in computing power every 18 years.
|
| If that were true it would actually be quite extraordinary, but
| in fact it's still hard to beat C and Fortran.
| atty wrote:
| That's because C and Fortran also continue to benefit from all
| the compiler research?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| It's (mostly) because C and Fortran continue to benefit from
| all the hardware research.
| tgflynn wrote:
| So if you ran benchmarks compiled using the best C compiler
| from 2004 compared against the best current C compiler on
| 2004 era hardware you'd see a factor of 2 performance gain ?
| That's possible, I suppose, but I doubt it.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Turn off optimizations and find out.
| tgflynn wrote:
| Compiler optimizations existed 18 years ago.
| yakubin wrote:
| Current compiler optimisations are written with current
| hardware in mind, while I doubt that older optimisations
| would become pessimisations on newer hardware, so I'd
| compare the performance of the best C compiler from 2004
| against the performance of the current best C compiler on
| today's hardware instead.
| kragen wrote:
| I have seen that kind of thing happen, yeah. I used to use
| dumb Fibonacci as an easy microbenchmark for getting a
| rough idea of language implementation efficiency:
| __attribute__((fastcall)) int fib(int n) {
| return n < 2 ? 1 : fib(n-1) + fib(n-2); }
| main(int c, char **v) { printf("%d\n", fib(atoi(v[1]))); }
|
| This gives a crude idea of the performance of some basic
| functionality: arithmetic, (recursive) function calls,
| conditionals, comparison. But on recent versions of GCC it
| totally stopped working because GCC unrolls the recursive
| loop several levels deep, doing constant propagation
| through the near-leaves, yielding more than an order of
| magnitude speedup. It still prints the same number, but
| it's no longer a useful microbenchmark; its speed is just
| determined by how deeply the unrolling happens.
|
| It's unusual to see such big improvements on real programs,
| and more recent research has shown that Proebsting's
| flippant "law" was too optimistic.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| Another way of putting it: once it's obviously a huge success
| you're too late.
| markoutso wrote:
| Does anyone find this interesting?
|
| I respect Peter Norvig as a programmer and a problem solver. I've
| taken a course taught by him in the early mooc days that I really
| enjoyed.
|
| What I don't understand how does something like that makes it to
| the top of Hacker News.
|
| I used to visit HN to get smarter, lately I feel that I am
| getting dumber.
| rvba wrote:
| Probably people from Google want to make some positive spin
| after the company killed another product.
| cranium wrote:
| You can double again if you go below 50%.
| hirundo wrote:
| If it was unbreakable it would be inconsistent with "laws" like
| Moore's and Gilder's.
| [deleted]
| nostrademons wrote:
| Or if you redefine the technology. That's the way it usually
| happens: "Android Gingerbread has 1% market share. 2%. 4%. 8%.
| 16%, better introduce Android KitKat. 32%. 64%, but look KitKat
| is now at 4% and climbing exponentially! Gingerbread is now
| deprecated, KitKat is on a majority of devices, time to
| introduce Lollipop."
|
| Come to think of it, this applies to a lot of Google's (and
| Microsoft's, and Apple's, and most tech companies') product
| strategy.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I attended a talk at the Royal Geographical Society where someone
| explained that given current trends, the super rich would own
| X00% of the planet if current trends continued for fifty years.
| And I never understood it. It's like, yeah, ok, if your model of
| wealth is that there are literally 100 gold bars somewhere then
| yes, that would be a contradiction. But firstly, lots of things
| are S-curves, not exponents, and secondly, we can just change
| what we measure. It looks to me that this comment is talking
| about something like this article:
|
| >http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9902/11/50pc.idg/index...
|
| Ok. Well, the US is a few hundred million people in a world of
| 6-7 billion. So yes, doubling would have been impossible. But it
| happened. According to some source that i just googled[2] there
| are 6 billion smartphones right now. So this schmuck thought that
| computers were hitting the wall coming up to 150million. That's
| an order magnitude of wrongness, and I bet you, the average
| person in the US today has _multiple_ computers more powerful
| than a 1999 computer. One in their phone, one in their iPad, one
| in their laptop, one in their fridge, one in their coffee
| machine, one in the doorbell, one in their robot hoover, one in
| their thermostat. I mean.. it 's a mad lack of imagination.
|
| [2]: https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-
| the-w...
| togaen wrote:
| Cute
| mynegation wrote:
| Mynegation's corollary: anything that can be allocated at maximum
| 1 unit per person, can experience at most 33 contiguous periods
| of doubling.
| gweinberg wrote:
| Sure it can, but not until the population exceeds 16 billion.
| Same as with Norvig: the penetration percent will never double
| again, but the number of users can still keep going up. As the
| the song says, "population keeps on breeding..."
| mynegation wrote:
| Fair enough. I probably should have added a condition that
| the doubling period is significantly shorter than population
| doubling period.
| yakubin wrote:
| That _Proebsting 's law_ link is of course dead, and redirects to
| the main page of Microsoft Research. In my experience, it's the
| natural state of links to Microsoft Research pages. What's up
| with that?
| svat wrote:
| The earliest Wayback Machine archive of that link is from
| August 2000:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20000824013718/http://research.m...
|
| Looks like in December 2008 (between
| https://web.archive.org/web/20081204015038/http://research.m...
| which works, and the next snapshot on Dec 30) it started
| redirecting to a new URL (https://web.archive.org/web/200902242
| 24249/http://research.m...) which was still working as of
| 2012-03 (https://web.archive.org/web/20120307142916/http://rese
| arch.m...). Meanwhile, https://proebsting.cs.arizona.edu/ says
| that Todd Proebsting joined the University of Arizona in August
| 2012 after leaving Microsoft, so presumably that's when the
| link stopped working. He still has it up at his new site:
| https://proebsting.cs.arizona.edu/law.html
| bombcar wrote:
| Microsoft seems to do a massive restructuring of their website
| every few years and they break all links in the process.
| Raymond's blog has suffered this a few times.
| float4 wrote:
| Can't answer your question, but here's the law (I was curious
| myself):
|
| > I claim the following simple experiment supports this
| depressing claim. Run your favorite set of benchmarks with your
| favorite state-of-the-art optimizing compiler. Run the
| benchmarks both with and without optimizations enabled. The
| ratio of of those numbers represents the entirety of the
| contribution of compiler optimizations to speeding up those
| benchmarks. Let's assume that this ratio is about 4X for
| typical real-world applications, and let's further assume that
| compiler optimization work has been going on for about 36
| years. These assumptions lead to the conclusion that compiler
| optimization advances double computing power every 18 years.
| QED.
|
| > This means that while hardware computing horsepower increases
| at roughly 60%/year, compiler optimizations contribute only 4%.
| Basically, compiler optimization work makes only marginal
| contributions.
|
| > Perhaps this means Programming Language Research should be
| concentrating on something other than optimizations. Perhaps
| programmer productivity is a more fruitful arena.
|
| https://proebsting.cs.arizona.edu/law.html
| bombcar wrote:
| Some of that computer horsepower increase is due to chips
| learning how compilers create code and optimizing for
| compiled code.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I find that code performance optimization is not worthwhile a
| lot of the time. But developer performance optimization is
| almost always worthwhile.
|
| One might argue that cheap overseas development labour makes
| it a commodity, but I care more for being humane towards
| humans than CPUs.
| yakubin wrote:
| A lot of times code compiled with no optimisations (-O0) is
| unusable. Specifically, in video some software compiled
| without optimisations won't push frames on time and instead
| will just keep dropping frames. There was a post a couple
| days ago about it being problematic in the games industry
| where a game compiled without optimisations is unplayable,
| while higher optimisation levels are hard to inspect in a
| debugger, due to the myth of "zero-cost-abstractions" in
| C++. Also to put it on its head a bit, when a compiler
| isn't fast enough (read not enough work was put into
| performance of the compiler itself, mostly on the design
| level, not on the microoptimisation level really), the
| feedback loop is so long, that developers stop testing out
| hypotheses and instead try to do as much as possible in
| their heads, without verifying, only to avoid the cost of
| recompiling a project. Another instance: when a photo-
| editing application can't quickly give me a preview of the
| photo I'm editing, I'm going to test fewer possible edits
| and probably get a worse photo as a result. With websites,
| if an action doesn't happen within a couple seconds of me
| clicking I often assume the website doesn't work and just
| close it, even though I know there are a lot of crappy
| websites out there that are just this slow. Doesn't matter.
| The waiting usually isn't worth my time and frustration.
| oriolid wrote:
| > One might argue that cheap overseas development labour
| makes it a commodity
|
| It was already argued in 90s, and several companies bet on
| outsourcing to India. It wasn't a success for everyone.
| necubi wrote:
| Compiler optimizations can actually improve developer
| productivity, because they allow developers to write clean
| but inefficient code that can be rewritten to near optimal
| form. For example, in Rust iterators are a very convenient
| and clear interface that are generally zero cost (sometimes
| even more efficient) compared to a manual loop
| implementation. But without optimization, they would be
| many times slower.
| brent_noorda wrote:
| You should make a law about Microsoft research pages and name
| it after yourself.
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