It’s hard to believe that a company worth billions and taking on the might of Microsoft for tech domination is less than ten years old but hey, that’s the technology revolution for ya. Google are kicking off their tenth year celebrations with the launch of a cool little microsite which includes a timeline showing the development of Google.
For me, I pretty much remember the day when I first used Google, back in 2000 i’d say. For years i’d hopped between Magellan, Altavista, Lycos, Hotbot, and all the other meta based search engines that came and went as time went by. When I first used Google I loved the simplicity of the design, relevance of results, and the quirky nature of the ‘About us’ pages and all that.
Today, our business relies on Google for increasing amounts of tasks – we use Gmail for our company email, this in turn integrates with Salesforce.com, I use Google Docs for everything from insertion orders to timesheets, Google Calendar for remembering when I have meetings (these also get fed onto my mobile), generate revenue from Adsense and drive traffic using Adwords, plan my trips and holidays using Google Maps, use Google Analytics to measure site traffic, and most importantly use the Google search engine to solve pretty much any question I have to ask myself, every day.
Are Google taking over the world? Maybe – but if they are they’re doing it well, and their recent launches of Google Chrome and their first mobile device tell us their levels of innovation will probably never let up.
Happy birthday Google!