How many gigs?

The Age

OBSOLETE: Keeping up with new technology is vital to business survival.

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OPINION: As the young boys bustled off the Eastbourne ferry on the way to primary school, one said to the other , "how many gigabytes to run a movie on your phone?"

At a similar age, I was at the forefront of New Zealand computer technology, writing programs in Fortran, pushing  chads out of punch cards to take down to the Databank computer centre in Wellington.

In those days we talked about 8 and 16 bit bytes. Now we talk in gigabytes and even terabytes, some 16,000,000,000,000 times bigger than a bit.

The point is not to show how much computer technology has improved; more that the young boys reminded me of the importance of technology to business survival.

If you want your business to prosper, then you need to stay relevant and you must invest in technology.

Most businesses fail because they are undercapitalised. In tough times everyone is looking to save money and cut costs. However the businesses that will prosper will be well-capitalised and will reinvest in their businesses.

For many businesses, computers are a fundamental tool, and, used properly, are an asset in every sense of the word.

To have out-of-date technology is foolhardy because your competition will soon pass you by.

The speed that business is transacted these days is phenomenal; but we need to adapt to this speed and to the pace of change itself.

The term the quick and the dead applies as much to business these days as it does to its use popularised in the old Wild West gun fights.

You can’t fight change, so you had better learn to embrace it, or you will be left behind and eventually die.
And think about those young boys, they are the employees of the future.

They will be IT savvy and will want to work with the latest and greatest.

If you can’t attract good staff, you will fail on both human and technological capital. Without those, you might as well bring a knife to that gunfight, as much use as that would be.

And the answer? Whilst the boy answered four, and though the true answer might be closer to eight, it does not matter, because in 30 years time the terminology will be at least in yottabytes.

For the uber-geek, that’s a septillion - a number with 24 zeros on the end of it.

- Adam Davy is Managing Partner of BDO’s Wellington office.