ZAG: The Number-One Strategy of High-Performance Brands

The Big Speedup

The starter’s pistol was fired in 1965 with Gordon Moore’s bold prediction: The number of transistors in a given space would double each year, while the cost of each transistor would decrease, and its speed would increase. Forty years later the spirit of Moore’s Law still holds, and his company, Intel, remains at the heart of a revolution in speed that has altered our lives in ways we’ve yet to fully comprehend.

As computing power has grown, so has our access to information. For example, in 1998 Google had an index of 25 million pages. By the end of 2004 its index had grown to 8 billion pages—a 360-fold increase. And the speed? When I entered the search term “speed of business,” Google delivered 170 million citations in 0.2 seconds ...