[georgemcbay]

"When people say they're looking to grow by an order of magnitude they usually mean ten times."

I think this gives "people" too much credit.

In my experience when people say they're looking to grow by an order of magnitude, they don't know that has a very specific meaning and they're just talking about getting bigger by some vague undefined number that could be anything from about two times on up.

[vegashacker]

Not saying you're wrong, but in my experience I only hear this phrase from technical people, and my understanding is they always mean base 10. Which was surprising to me cause in my CS education I was basically taught to forget base 10 and only think in 2s).

[ISL]

In physics and astronomy, 10 is the dominant logarithmic base. It's my impression that it's also the case in engineering circles.

An important upshot of the article is really the idea that you should think logarithmically about scaling. It's a scale-independent way to think. It's an easy way to get a website that gets 10 hits/day on the same plot as one that gets 10^9 hits/day.

An example is here: http://measuredmass.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/more-hn-numbers...

[georgemcbay]

I've heard it quite a bit from people who are exposed to technology regularly but not explicitly technical. For example, product managers that didn't come from the engineering side.

I don't even really blame them, because I'm sure they simply hear the phrase a few times from technical people without explicit explanation of meaning and then adopt it themselves to mean "any big growth" which is a fairly reasonable assumption contextually, prior to someone pointing out to them that it means something more specific.

FWIW, in my CS education (both at school and self-directed via books, system manuals and such) I was taught to worry about whatever base is relevant to my current data and level of abstraction to the machine. 2, 10, 16 and even 8 were the usual culprits, but certainly nobody tried to teach me to forget about the ones other than 2. I worry about base 2 far less than base 10 in my day to day code despite the fact that I'm old and know assembly (6502, 68k, x86, MIPS, ARM) and still do a lot of bit-twiddling.

[shalmanese]

That's because we already have a word for a base two growth: doublings. Being engineers and having two words, it's best to be maximally precise by assigning each a distinct, unambiguous meaning.

[ChuckMcM]

Well for marketing people it can mean '2' and for technical people it does often mean '10'. But it gets also lumped into people who use the term "exponential" growth.

As Gabe points out, decimal orders of magnitude are good sign posts because they often separate the space into meaningful chunks, what ever it is.

Think about your own earning potential, the differences between earning $100/month, $1000/month, $10,000/month and $100,000 a month. Those are very different places to be.