What does speed give and give away?

At most time, speed represents efficiency and productive as many employees want their employers and their business models to have fast response and reaction and complete missions fast. Many people use computers to boost up their productivity in terms of calculation speed and other types of efficiency, companies use computers to speed up their execution speed to allow them to make more business activities and decisions in the constrained period of time. However, does speed only provide competitiveness and strength? What is the cost of increasing the speed?

The benefits of having faster speed are relatively more obvious. Firstly ,when a company is able to execute more business decisions and activities than its competitors, it is more likely to generate more revenues and profits, and gain more market shares, as its productive capacity is greater than its competitors. Secondly, when a company is able to receive information faster, it can have more time for analysis or make responses ahead of its competitors. In some markets, especially the financial market, the access to information is crucial and in some cases it can determine the difference between success and failure. Thirdly, when a company is able to make faster analysis, the benefit of it is similar as when it can faster receive information, it can get upper hand advantage. Of course there are many other benefits. Since the benefits are obvious, I do not want to discuss too much on its benefit.

Increasing speed has its down side and costs. Firstly, the cost of increasing speed is geometrically growing. It is much easier to increase the speed from 5km/h to 10km/h than to increase the speed from 7200km/h to 7205km/h. As the difficulty increases enormously, the cost as well increases enormously. Sometimes, it is merely impossible to further increase the speed upon certain limits; for example, based on our current technology, it is impossible for us to reach the light speed, though we have been trying to get closer to the light speed. Secondly, once a speed technology is available, it forces all companies to increase their expenditures to reach the fastest possible speed in order to compete with each other. However, the efficiency of such investment is questionable, as the cost of speeding up its business may be much greater than the revenue improvement. When speed is used fro marketing, the function of increasing speed is no longer about productivity, instead its function becomes a signalling effect to present companies’ abilities of having certain achievement. For example, customers like screens with higher and higher resolutions; however, upon certain point, our human eyes cannot really tell the differences. Thirdly, speed is a magnifier it can enlarge the revenues and profits, but it can enlarge the costs and risks as well. Our human beings have our limits of reaction and response speed. When the speed is too fast, we are no longer able to cope with the issues and mistakes occurred in our superspeedy business model. Fourthly, speed is not always desirable in every single sector. Nowadays, we are dealing with machine more and more often that not only employees use their computers as their primary working tools, customer services are starting to use AI rather than human beings. It is almost certain that in the future, direct communication between human beings could become rarer and rarer; maybe patient listeners could become a very popular luxury service.

To conclude, the cost of further increasing speed is incredibly high, as it could potentially be used by large companies to win over their small competitors; however, when speeding up becomes the mainstream of our life, slowing down could potentially become a new popular luxury service.