Loading...
Legendary product launches, keynotes, and pivotal moments — Steve Jobs' iPhone reveal, the first Google search, Linus posting about Linux
A 16-month-old company that gave its product away for free and had never earned a dollar of profit opened at $28, hit $75 by lunch, and minted a 24-year-old billionaire-in-waiting. Wall Street would never be sane again.
On December 9, 1968, a soft-spoken engineer walked onto a stage in San Francisco, plugged into a mainframe 30 miles away, and demonstrated every technology that would define computing for the next 60 years. Then he was forgotten.
March 2000. While Larry Ellison was announcing Oracle's $1 billion software suite, his former VP stood outside with protesters holding 'END SOFTWARE' signs. Four minutes later, Salesforce had changed enterprise software forever.
On Labor Day 1995, a programmer posted a broken laser pointer online as an experiment. When it sold for $14.83 to a collector, Pierre Omidyar realized he'd stumbled onto something bigger than e-commerce — he'd discovered that the internet could create markets for anything.
On August 6, 1991, a British physicist at CERN typed a message to the alt.hypertext newsgroup announcing a project called 'WorldWideWeb.' The response was silence. This is the story of the most important product launch in history that absolutely nobody cared about.
On September 1, 2008, Larry Page walked into a San Francisco theater with a comic book and a browser nobody asked for. Within 90 minutes, he declared war on Microsoft, Mozilla, and the entire web — and won.
April 20, 1998. Bill Gates stood before 3,000 people at COMDEX Chicago to demonstrate plug-and-play. Then Windows 98 blue-screened in front of the world — and the video went viral before YouTube existed.
On June 21, 1995, Microsoft invited Netscape to their campus for a 'partnership discussion.' Three hours later, Netscape walked out knowing they were about to be destroyed — and the DOJ called it a smoking gun.
April 2010. Steve Jobs didn't write a blog post to kill Flash—he gave a demo. No charts, no benchmarks, just an iPad, a sofa, and 90 seconds that made Adobe's engineers realize their decade of work was over.
In 1996, Larry Page built a search engine so powerful it crashed Stanford's network for hours. The university wanted to shut it down. He had to find a way to make it faster — or kill it forever.
On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs showed the world a revolutionary phone. What the audience didn't know: the iPhone in his hand was held together with duct tape, crash-prone software, and a very specific sequence of moves he couldn't deviate from.
On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs walked onto the Macworld stage and introduced three products. Except it was only one. The audience didn't see it coming — and that was the point.