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ACM forum acmforum Grosch ™s Law: An Aging Yardstick? I was intrigued by the article entitled œEconomies of Scale in Computing: Grosch ™s Law Revisited  [3] in which Haim Mendelson takes a view opposing the one expounded by Phillip Ein-Dor some three years ago [2]. The author begins by postulating a œtrue model  with constant returns to scale and ends up with the finding that œthe decade is characterized by the commodization of hardware, resulting in a constant average cost per XIIPS.  This is, however, a mere tautology in relation to the initial assertion. Moreover, in his introductory .note, Edgar Sibley makes the unqualified statement that œcomputer technology is characterized by consiant returns to scale.  Although I do not doubt in the least that Mendelson ™s selection of data was unbiased and also that all the simulations performed were equally bias-free, I have some serious misgivings regarding the lessons to be drawn from the whole exercise. First, as an economist by training (my credentials include a Ph.D. and M.A. in economics, Columbia University], I must recall that constant returns to scale in an otherwise dynamic environment is a situation whic:h is seldom stable and hardly ever http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Communications of the ACM Association for Computing Machinery

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Ashenhurst, Robert L.
Communications of the ACM , Volume 31 (6) – Jun 1, 1988
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Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by ACM Inc.
ISSN
0001-0782
DOI
10.1145/62959.315806
Publisher site
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Abstract

acmforum Grosch ™s Law: An Aging Yardstick? I was intrigued by the article entitled œEconomies of Scale in Computing: Grosch ™s Law Revisited  [3] in which Haim Mendelson takes a view opposing the one expounded by Phillip Ein-Dor some three years ago [2]. The author begins by postulating a œtrue model  with constant returns to scale and ends up with the finding that œthe decade is characterized by the commodization of hardware, resulting in a constant average cost per XIIPS.  This is, however, a mere tautology in relation to the initial assertion. Moreover, in his introductory .note, Edgar Sibley makes the unqualified statement that œcomputer technology is characterized by consiant returns to scale.  Although I do not doubt in the least that Mendelson ™s selection of data was unbiased and also that all the simulations performed were equally bias-free, I have some serious misgivings regarding the lessons to be drawn from the whole exercise. First, as an economist by training (my credentials include a Ph.D. and M.A. in economics, Columbia University], I must recall that constant returns to scale in an otherwise dynamic environment is a situation whic:h is seldom stable and hardly ever

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Communications of the ACM – Association for Computing Machinery

Published: Jun 1, 1988

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