Skimping on costs might seem like a bad thing. But lowering costs is what businesses are all about. While the price of housing and education go up and up, private companies in the business of making stuff, like computers, are pushing their prices down, year on year.
Take Moore’s law, for instance. Moore’s law says that the number of transistors on a microprocessor will double every 18 months or so. In effect, Moore’s law means that consumers get double the performance for the same price, every year and a half. The marginal cost of a unit of computing is constantly falling, getting closer and closer to zero.
There are all sorts of ways businesses are using tech to skimp on costs. Here are just a few.
Outsourcing Their IT To The Cloud
The Small Business Owner’s Complete Guide To Successful Outsourcing
If you’ve got a business, you’ll have noticed that there are a lot of services you can get – usually for free – over the cloud. A great example are Google office tools. Though they might not quite have the functionality to match Microsoft’s proprietary productivity software, they’re usually good enough for most businesses to do what they want to do. Google isn’t the only service boosting companies and reducing their expenses. MailChimp and Freshbooks are good examples of premium services that wind up saving companies a lot of money.
But perhaps the biggest change that the cloud has brought to business is the ability to scale, piece by piece. There’s no need to buy a bunch of servers ahead of time, just in case demand for a business’s product goes through the roof. Instead, a company can buy more cloud services incrementally, as and when it needs them. This helps to maximize efficiency and save on costs.
Using Modular Machinery
7 pieces of modular tech to get excited about
It’s not only in the digital world where companies are taking a granular approach to their costs. Thanks to companies like Reliant Finishing, it’s something that they’re now able to do in the physical world too. It’s now possible to buy machinery that scales as business requirements increase. As a result, companies want to learn more about their products. The idea is basically to have equipment that can be bolted together from smaller modules, allowing production to scale depending on demand. If demand is low, the equipment itself is less costly. If demand is high, equipment is more costly, but it is also being utilized to its full potential.
Getting Bots To Respond To Customers
Twitter taught Microsoft’s AI chatbot to be a racist a**hole in less than a day
Last year, Microsoft introduced the world to Tay, a chatbot that was designed to interact with people on Twitter as if it was a teenager. Tay had a few teething problems, though. After it had spoken to enough people, it started ranting and raving and had to be removed from the internet. But Tay taught the designers of chatbots a lot, and now they’re being used by smart companies to answer customer questions. This is allowing companies to employ fewer customer support staff, helping them to skimp on costs over time. As it turns out, most queries can be answered by a chatbot.