Comment by strgcmc

When you add lanes to a highway, it generally does not improve congestion or travel times. Drivers adjust and fill up the new lanes, until travel times are roughly the same as before (but with slightly more throughput now).

So it is with hardware and software. I don't see any reason to correlate faster/better hardware with an expectation that software must also get better. It would be economically irrational for the software industry (whatever that means) to spend resources/energy on improving efficiency when the "gains" from hardware are essentially a free lunch to eat... Who would pay for lunch or spend time making their own, when hardware guys are giving you bigger portions for free?

That doesn't mean you have to like the outcome, but at least it should be perfectly predictable, given what we know about economics and game theory and incentives.