What does Moore’s Law mean for business?

Moore’s Law wasn’t intended to be a law.

When Gordon Moore observed, in 1965, that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit was doubling roughly every two years it was exactly that: An observation. Albeit one that held true for half a century and dictated semiconductor development roadmaps.

However, more recent discussions have questioned whether Moore’s Law still applies in today’s technological landscape. Intel (two years ago, no less) changed its roadmap to push back new chip models and, thus, throw Moore’s Law right out of the window.

On the other hand, artificial intelligence advancements have accelerated Nvidia’s GPU development faster than Moore’s Law would predict.

The answer — if there is one — to that debate isn’t the interesting part of Moore’s Law, though. It’s what that need for consistent improvement means to a businesses’ activities, and how it translates to non-technical domains.

“Do more with less” is a cliché we’ve all heard at some time. But clichés exist for a reason. Finding a way to fulfil this requirement has become the focus for many businesses. This leads to thinking about the ways in which time and human effort can be minimized and still result in better outcomes — a bit like reducing the size of CPUs while increasing their capabilities — whether that’s through automation or any of the other more nascent technologies still emerging now.

What’s undeniable, however, is that it’s no longer just about hardware getting smaller and more powerful. The push for new developments that keep pace with Moore’s Law hasn’t abated, but the way in which we achieve them has changed.

Now it’s about looking at the way in which technology can be used to best harness the capabilities of the other technologies that make up this increasingly complex and diverse stack. Automation is a natural candidate for easing that workload.

As individual tools and solutions become more complex, automation is increasingly the “glue” that brings these pieces together to achieve the promises of increased efficiency and lower costs. They are the technologies that turn the bits and bytes into useful, actionable information for businesses.

Crucially, though, these technologies allows us to get the most out of our existing technology stacks, increasing the capabilities of businesses without increasing complexity.

In the 1960s, increasing the number of transistors while shrinking unit size was the key to getting the most out of emerging technologies and, thus, productivity. Now, automation is key to making a complex IT world work better for businesses and the people that work in them.