ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I describe how Moore’s Law, and its underlying assumptions that technological change is rapid, perpetual, and inevitable, went from an engineering observation to a business model to an organizing principle for the consumer technology industry. Intel created a monopoly over microprocessor chips using both legal and illegal marketing strategies in their two key campaigns of Operation Crush and Intel Inside. Investing over $38 billion in the latter campaign between 1991 and 2018, Intel secured a virtual monopoly over the supply of microprocessor chips in the 1990s and 2000s. By forcing the personal computer manufacturers to upgrade computers at the pace Intel produced new generations of microchips, Intel shifted the balance of power in the industry from driven by computer manufacturers to driven by Intel and other microprocessor chip suppliers. Today, Moore’s Law is as much of a symbolic goal for the industry to maintain as it is a business model. Nonetheless, the expansion of the consumer technology industry and its concurrent cultural impact helped transform the assumptions of rapid, perpetual, and inevitable change at the heart of Moore’s Law into the dominant way of understanding change in the technological imagination.
