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Comment by pochamago | Hacker News Reader

A few reasons I would guess at:

Business startup by necessity has gone down. It's much easier to get hired by an international company in a niche field and work from home now, so people no longer are required to start a business to work in the field of their choice

It's more difficult to start something really innovative, related to the slowdown of Moore's Law

It's more difficult to start a business in an established field, as licensing laws have come to cover so much more of the landscape. You can no longer just decide to become a barber and hang out your shingle.

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> It's more difficult to start a business in an established field, as licensing laws have come to cover so much more of the landscape.

In my experience, it's been a problem with banks and small business loans being hard to obtain these days. Banks want a LOT of leverage, you have to already be doing pretty well.

Folks that are already pretty well-off aren't going to take the types of risks that create small businesses.

If either of the first two propositions was true, then we should be able to look at other first world countries around the world that should be experiencing the same pressure, and we would see a similar slump in small business creation, right?

This is the first I hear about the "slowdown of Moore's Law." Do you have any data to share? Thx.

Moore's law originally stated that the number of transistors per IC would double every 18 months. For a long time this was a remarkably accurate empirical law, but it has slowed down dramatically in the last decade or so.

As an individual example: in 1998, Intel's top-of-the-line CPU was the Pentium II with about 8 million transistors. In 2008, they released the Core 2 Extreme QX9770, with about 820 million transistors; this is a 100-fold increase in 10 years, which is almost exactly what Moore's law predicts.

Fast-forward another decade to 2018, and Intel's highest-end Xeon chips have something like 7 billion transistors, which is less than a 10-fold improvement in the same timeframe.

EDIT: that said, I think it's a real stretch to go from "the slowdown of Moore's law" to a sweeping claim about innovation in general being more difficult. There are a ridiculous number of different fields in which someone could start a business; relatively few of them are dependent on enormous, ever-increasing amounts of computational power.

I'd go even further to say, that we're at a point where not EVERYTHING needs to be smaller... our mobile devices are so small and difficult to hold, we're putting things on the back to make them easier to hold. They're so thin and fragile, we're putting thick cases on to protect them...

I'd love to see a production cell phone that is already thick with a relatively huge battery, more rugged case, and a slightly better protected display. I'm willing to bet there's a market for this, just based on otterbox sales, and the sales of backpack battery covers.

Similarly a home media player like the roku, shield tv or fire stick are plenty small. That has nothing to do with being able to innovate and create newer or better experiences.

From 1987 until 2011, Intel created a new manufacturing process every 2 years like clockwork. In 2013, their 14nm process was delayed one year to 2014. The next process, 10nm, is delayed 3 years, assuming it is not delayed again before the currently planned late 2019 release.

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/process

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