Apple & Google
Trips
19. March 2021
Manfred Goschler
I would like to take a brief look at the early days of two very successful companies from Silicon Valley around the world. Apple, which has developed from a small garage company into a global corporation, and Google or Alphabet, which took off a little more than 20 years later soaring with the development of the Internet.
Apple recently brought my attention to its company complex in Silicon Valley. It shows how quickly a small company founded in 1976 can grow. With Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and Ron Wayne, three young and enthusiastic people got together and complemented each other well; a brilliant computer freak, a visionary and a mediator to found a company in 1976.
Apple was innovative and did a lot to make computers more user-friendly in function and more appealing in design, as can be seen, for example, in the first personal computers with a graphical user interface and mouse operation or the first iPhone. With this, Apple has paved the way to decentralize the IT applications that had previously been on mainframes to smaller computers for business and private use. Functions together with a beautiful design appealed to people and to this day they have many followers who feel connected to the brand. The company’s marketing, where product innovations were celebrated with great hype, was also impressive. Or you think of the reports of long queues at the start of sales of your products, such as the first iPhone in 2007.
Examples (need to be updated):
Apple Macintosh
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_(Werbespot)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I
IPhone 2007
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1._Generation)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnrJzXM7a6o&t=70s
Google
Since the advent of the Google search engine before the turn of the millennium, I have also been impressed by other Google applications, such as Google Earth, which, as freely available software, made it possible to take virtual walks through New York, Los Angeles or Berlin long time ago. Since then, Google has repeatedly made a name for itself with innovative applications that are also available to private users. Of course, this is also part of a successful business model that has a strong impact on the development of IT and society.
When the Internet spread more and more in offices and private households in the mid-1990s, the success story of the two founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin began. With a lot of skill they got started with a search engine that is the most common today. At that time there was already a need to search for information in the growing network using simple methods. Google knew how to meet this demand with a simple and powerful application using keywords. With good search results and short response times, the search engine was able to prevail over the competition within a short period of time.
Another positive factor was that the cost of computing power continued to fall, paving the way for economic mass use. The further success of this application, which went online in 1997, can be guessed at when you see how the company name has manifested itself in our language. We have been “googling” for a long time. (You find further information in this Wikipedia link).
In addition to this search engine, many new, widespread applications for PC and other platforms were added, such as YouTube, Maps or Android as an operating system and soft platform for mobile devices. The list of applications and services is now much more extensive and it is not surprising that Google LLC has belonged to the parent company Alphabet Inc. since the company was restructured in 2015. An overview of the interesting development of Google can be found in the following links from Wikipedia for Google LLC and Alphabet Inc. It will remain an exciting question how Google will be in the future part of the market of new technologies, such as applications of artificial intelligence (AI).
