phrases - Meaning of "one order of magnitude improvement"



There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.



What exactly is the message trying to say? What exactly does it mean by one order of magnitude improvement?



Answer



An order of magnitude is:



the class of scale or magnitude of any amount, where each class contains values of a fixed ratio to the class preceding it. In its most common usage, the amount being scaled is 10 and the scale is the (base 10) exponent being applied to this amount (therefore, to be an order of magnitude greater is to be 10 times as large). Such differences in order of magnitude can be measured on the logarithmic scale in "decades" (i.e. factors of ten).



To start, let's simplify the excerpt:



There is no development that promises an improvement of even one order of magnitude.



Since an "order of magnitude" is used to mean a major improvement, we can say that there is no development that gives a major improvement.


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