电脑业/IT no big change for yrs already--Law of diminishing returns

 Law of diminishing returns
Sun, Mar 19, 2017 - 10:37 AM 

Eventually things get so good, it is hard to make them better. New technologies are key, but are we reaching the limits of what technology can do? Fracking was a new technology that certainly changed the world of energy. But other technologies seem to be stagnating. Has the Internet changed much in the last 5 years? Can the latest generation of smart phones do anything that could not be done a couple of generations earlier? Are new drugs in the last 5 years much better than what we already had? 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns 

In economics, diminishing returns is the decrease in the marginal (incremental) output of a production process as the amount of a single factor of production is incrementally increased, while the amounts of all other factors of production stay constant. 

The law of diminishing returns states that in all productive processes, adding more of one factor of production, while holding all others constant ("ceteris paribus"), will at some point yield lower incremental per-unit returns.[1] The law of diminishing returns does not imply that adding more of a factor will decrease the total production, a condition known as negative returns, though in fact this is common. 

A common sort of example is adding more people to a job, or assembling a car on a factory floor. At some point, adding more workers causes problems such as workers getting in each other's way or frequently finding themselves waiting for access to a part. In all of these processes, producing one more unit of output per unit of time will eventually cost increasingly more, due to inputs being used less and less effectively.[2]