apple google amazon facebook and microsoft combined are worth about 9
trillion us dollars which is way more
than the entire gdp of japan
holy cow but how did these companies get so freaking big let's have a quick look
at how each one of these tech titans grew to become a member of the
industry's big five starting with microsoft the first of the companies to
be formed everyone knows microsoft for Windows but it was actually the earlier
ms-dos that really vaulted the company into international relevance and here's
why back in 1980 ibm needed an operating
system for its new Intel-based personal computer and got in touch with the
company digital research to license an os called cp
m which had been around for a while and was written specifically for Intel cpus
but surprisingly ibm and digital research couldn't work out a deal so big
blue asked microsoft to create an os
instead ironically microsoft didn't create one from scratch but instead
licensed an os called 86 dos which was
very similar to cpm and tweaked it to create ms-dos and by the time ibm
released its original pc in 1981 microsoft had already written lots of
software for ms-dos the ibm pc took off
in popularity quickly and as a result so did microsoft software and as other
computer companies created ibm compatibles ms-dos and later Windows
quickly spread to those pcs as well setting the stage for microsoft to
dominate home computing to this day
but there are plenty of macs and macbooks out there as well so let's talk
about apple did you know they very nearly went bankrupt as recently as
1996. apple was selling overpriced products
and that hasn't changed but back then their
overpriced products were underpowered and apple had way too many of them
meaning consumers often didn't even know what they were buying apple had to do
something drastic to avoid going under so steve jobs was brought back in 1997
and he made a crucial decision partner with apple's old rival
microsoft after microsoft invested 150 million
dollars into apple jobs simplified the product lineup and brought in joni ive
to transform apple into a design focused company the result was the original imac
in 1998 a simple attractive device that
was extremely popular and kept apple afloat followed by the ipod in 2001 the
ipod's practical design and clever marketing got the public to start
thinking of apple as a lifestyle brand a perception that was cemented after the
iphone came out in 2007. next up is amazon which started in 1994 as an
online bookseller jeff bezos chose books
because they didn't cost much to buy wholesale and he believed there was a
demand for books people had a hard time finding in physical stores turns out
he did it congratulations as amazon's
online only model let them sell a far wider selection of books than its brick
and mortar competitors this initial success allowed amazon to buy more
warehouse space and sell products like dvds and toys again the low overhead
meant amazon could undercut traditional retailers and before long amazon had
enough money to take chances on niceties like free shipping and one-click
ordering with the latter giving amazon insights into customer behavior a
relatively ahead of the curve idea at the time but perhaps the most
consequential decision was to make amazon web services available to the
public as it was originally a system aimed at making amazon's internal it
more efficient this happened in 2006 meaning amazon got ahead of the game in
terms of cloud computing this earned amazon so much money that the company
kept extending its tentacles into everything from game streaming to movies
to home security but you could possibly consider google to be the og cloud
computing company as its first product google search is all about asking a
computer in some distant location to fetch you an answer although google
wasn't the first search engine when it launched in 1997 it did something really
cool that other search engines weren't doing instead of presenting results
based on how many times your search string appears on a page it looked at
how many times other pages linked to a page in order to determine how relevant
and important a search result was although google's algorithm today is
much more complicated this innovation made it much more accurate and popular
than its rivals this made google an appealing platform to advertise on and
google wisely kept its ads text based for a cleaner look meaning it could load
results quickly further boosting its popularity the money it made off of
search meant it could buy Android in 2005 and youtube in 2006 and as
important as smartphones and online video are now the rest as they say
is a history but it was facebook that perhaps had the
fastest rise to becoming a global superpower as it was only founded in
2004 and even then it was a social network exclusively for harvard students
after expanding to other colleges investors saw the potential in the
platform which opened to the general public in 2006 because facebook offered
more features and less spam than its competitor myspace hi tom it overtook
the latter in popularity in 2009. by this time facebook had already become a
very valuable company through ad revenue and it put that revenue to good use in
2012 when it bought instagram for one
billion dollars sound like a lot well it
actually spent another 19 billion dollars on whatsapp just two years later
because the service already had around a half billion users and was growing at a
rate of million new users per day not
only has whatsapp since become extremely popular in huge swaths of the world but
it's allowed facebook to expand the reach of its other services as well so
that's how the big five got so big if only someone would have told me to
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below that was a tech wiki guys i'm not sure if you noticed hey like the video
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