Ten Laws of the Modern World
Gilder’s Law: Winner’s Waste. The futurist George Gilder wrote about this a few years ago in a Forbes publication. The best business models, he said, waste the era’s cheapest resources in order to conserve the era’s most expensive resources. When steam became cheaper than horses, the smartest businesses used steam and spared horses. Today the cheapest resources are computer power and bandwidth. Both are getting cheaper by the year (at the pace of Moore’s Law). Google is a successful business because it wastes computer power–it has some 120,000 servers powering its search engine–while it conserves its dearest resource, people. Google has fewer than 3,500 employees, yet it generates $5 billion in (current run rate) sales.