In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore postulated that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit will double approximately every two years. The impact of that for most of us comes in two areas: size and speed. As the number of transistors increases, the size of the devices gets smaller. Think about the cell phones transition from mounted to bagged to clip-on to pocket. The bigger impact though, is speed. Everything runs faster because of the impact of Moore's Law.

Many people said that at some point, the fact that we can go faster doesn't mean we need to go faster. This kind of thinking misses the point. Sure, your computer is just sitting there waiting on you to do something as you read this post. However, clever people have found things for it to do. While I'm typing this, my computer is also performing a continuous backup of my data. It's doing a continuous defrag of my hard drive (usually the element that makes your machine slow). It's scanning for viruses. It's listening for my wife's computer to request data or send it a print job. And it's doing a dozen other things that I'd have to stop typing and wait while it did them if I didn't have the speed.

So, if things are doubling in speed about every two years, how fast is your computer consulting services company? How fast should it be? We believe that the best small business computer support we can provide to our Indianapolis customers comes from being as fast as Moore's Law. Our goal is to bring the power of computer services to our clients in a way that allows them to move at that same speed.

Where do you see your IT support company's speed? It's not in how fast they respond to a crisis. It's in how fast they bring new ideas to your business. How often do they introduce technology to your business that impacts the way you do business? Are they giving you the opportunity to be ahead of your peers and competitors, or do you find yourself asking them about something that you saw a competitor using successfully?

I took a design class in college. One day, the professor walks in and asks us all, "What's the best response time?" We started scribbling equations to try to calculate some generic formula, but he stopped us. He said, "The best response time is anything that is better than you've ever had." A good computer outsourcing company must always compete with its best response time.