[bluGill]

If you have been in the industry for a few decades you will be able to think of several hundred "silver bullets" that made great promises - some even turned out to be great ideas, but none where the 10x revolution that they promised.

The article is a good summary of major movements through the decades without so much that whole point is lost in the details. I would have put in a slightly different set of things if I wanted to write that article, but the point would still stand and I would leave out many things that could be put in but would be too much noise.

[vladms]

Maybe that's due to Amdahl's law applied to software. Everybody imagines that task X which is improved by 10x is 100% of the total work, so you will get 10x overall benefit, when in fact might be something like 20% of the work, so your overall benefit is only 1.21x .