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Definition: Wirth's law


"Software slows down faster than hardware speeds up," coined by Nicklaus Wirth, Swiss computer scientist, who developed Pascal as well as other programming languages. It refers to the software bloat of modern applications and operating systems. Although the CPU clock in modern computers is thousands of times faster than the first personal computers in the late 1970s, applications often run at the same speed as they did back then.

Faster, But...
If applications do run faster, the increased throughput (actual work getting done) is still nowhere near equal to the hardware improvement. For example, rendering a certain image today may be 50 times faster than in the early days, but not a thousand times. See laws and software bloat.