A customer downloads an app from Apple every millisecond. The firm sells 1,000 iPhones, iPads or Macs every couple of minutes. It whips through its inventories in four days and launches a new product every four weeks. Manic trading by computers and speculators means the average Apple share changes hands every five months. Such hyperactivity in the world's biggest company by market value makes it easy to believe that 21st-century business is pushing its pedals ever harder to the metal. On Apple's home turf in Silicon Valley the idea that things are continually speeding up is a commonplace. "The pace of change is accelerating," Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg of Google assert in their book "How Google Works". For evidence look no further than the "unicorns"-highflying startups-which can win billion-dollar valuations within a year or two of coming into being. In a few years they can erode the profits of industries that took many decades to build.
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