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Follow UsTwenty five years may be an insignificant time period if we were to compare it with the lessons we take in history. However, when it comes to IT, the past 25 years have changed the world completely. There are many companies that deserve the accolades for achieving this, and it would be impossible to summarize all that they've done in this entire magazine, let alone in a single article. So here, we'll simply pay a tribute to those companies and some of their achievements that have completely changed our lives for the better. Presented here are those companies sorted from oldest to newest.
The Centenarians
Xerox Corporation
Still known for photo-copying, Xerox started off as a manufacturing company which produced photogenic paper and equipment, but is known for contributing many significant inventions to the IT industry from its PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) facility. The center is known for having developed many significant inventions like laser printing, the GUI (adopted and commercially sold by Apple as Lisa first and later as the Macintosh), Ethernet (the de-facto standard in LANs today), object-oriented programming, the concept of ubiquitous computing, and many others.
IBM
IBM has topped the list of being the most inventive companies for many years. The company has shattered all US patent records by filing the maximum number of patents for many years in a row. So whether it's the first commercially successful electric typewriter, the FORTRAN programming language, laser optical memory, the relational database, the floppy disk, the hard disk, the PC itself, DRAM, RISC architecture, and so on. The list of inventions by IBM are endless, and we all know the impact they've had on our lives, be it personal or professional. On August 12, 1981, IBM released their new computer model 5150, re-named the IBM PC. The "PC" stood for "personal computer" making IBM responsible for popularizing the term "PC". The IBM PC (of $1,565) was the smallest and cheapest computer built to-date. IBM hired Microsoft to write the OS for its PC, which was called MS-DOS.
Nokia Corporation
Nokia is actually an industrial conglomerate with a history that dates back all the way to 1865, when it came into being with its pulp and paper manufacturing business. The seeds of Nokia as we know it today, were actually planted in 1960. Nokia has been credited as one of the main companies involved with the development of the GSM standard that is capable of carrying data and voice traffic. The world's first GSM mobile phone was a Nokia product known as the Nokia 1011 and it was launched in 1992.
Siemens
Founded in 1847 in Germany, Siemens is an integrated technology company offering solutions for the fields of industry, energy and healthcare, and is acknowledged as the largest electronics and electrical engineering in Europe.
Visionaries: 1920 to Pre-1970s
Bell Labs
This is one company that gave a slew of inventions to the world of modern computing.It built a number of revolutionary technologies like the UNIX operating system, the C and C++ programming languages, the transistor, the laser, and radio astronomy. UNIX became the base for a lot of operating systems, while C became the mother of all modern day programming languages.
Motorola
Motorola has many firsts to its credit. In 1973, the company, developed the first hand-held mobile phone, which weighed about 1 kg. Ten years later in 1983, Motorola mass produced and sold the world's first commercial mobile phone called the DynaTAC. This was an analogue mobile phone. In 1995, the world's first 2 way pager was also a Motorola product. In June 2000, world's first GPRS cell phone was developed by Motorola in collaboration with Cisco. Motorola was divided into Motorola solutions and Motorola Mobility, with the latter division getting acquired by Google in 2011.
Texas Instruments
More commonly known as TI, the company is the 3rd largest manufacturer of semiconductors worldwide after Intel and Samsung, the second largest supplier of chips for cellular handsets after Qualcomm, and the largest producer of digital signal processors (DSPs) and analog semiconductors, among other products. TI is also credited with the world's first transistor radio. Integrated circuits, speech synthesis chips are also said to be a TI invention.
Hewlett-Packard Company
Many firsts are credited to HP, which include the world's first desktop scientific calculator, the world's first scientific hand-held calculator, etc. HP has been particularly prominent in the printing space, with its laser and inkjet printing range. The world's first web-connected home printer, wireless mouse were also an HP invention. Its acquisition of Compaq made HP the world's biggest PC manufacturer against IBM.
Sony Corporation
The biggest contribution by this electronics giant is invention of the compact disc (CD) which became a de-facto standard for software distribution. Sony was also instrumental in developing the Blu-Ray disc and Disc players which are touted to be the future of optical media because of the sheer storage capacity and longevity of the product. Plus of course, Sony is known for revolutionizing the gaming world with its PlayStation Gaming console, which sold over 150 million units as of 2011.
Intel Corporation
Intel brought computing to the masses with its x86 architecture based microprocessors. The processors made it possible to manufacture PCs in smaller form factors. Intel created the world's 1st commercial microprocessor chip, the 4004 in 1971. The power of this thumbnail sized microprocessor was about the same as the room-sized ENIAC. IBM first used an upgraded version of this microprocessor in the IBM PC. The rest as they say is history, with the microprocessor becoming ever more powerful year after year, and with it, the PC, which has completely changed our lives. The semiconductor giant is credited with a lot of inventions, starting with the integrated circuit or the microchip. Besides microprocessors, Intel is credited with many other IT innovations that have had a major impact on our world like USB, the single board computer, microcontrollers, the PCI bus on motherboards, and much more.
AMD
The company is the 2nd-largest global supplier of microprocessors based on the x86 architecture after Intel, and also one of the largest suppliers of graphics processing units after its acquisition of ATI. AMD is also the world's second biggest GPU manufacturer after nVIDIA, holding around 32% market share for the same.
Samsung Electronics
In 2009, the company took the position of the world's biggest IT maker by surpassing the previous leader HP. It's sales revenue in the areas of LCD and LED displays and memory chips is number one in the world. Its Galaxy range of smartphones and tablets are well known as products that took Apple's might head-on. So much so that Samsung overtook Apple in smartphone sales during Q3 2011, with a total market share of 23.8%, against Apple's 14.6%.
The Era of Transition --1970s
Western Digital
WDC started off as a company which manufactured calculator chips. Its other famous inventions also include the microcoded CPU, the first single-chip floppy disk controller, and first single-chip ATA hard disk controller. In the early 1980s, WDC came out with its first storage line of product called the WD1771. WDC introduced the first 8 MB cache buffer ATA hard drive. Today, from a unit shipment and revenue perspective, WDC and Seagate exchange blows in the race for being the number one storage unit manufacturer.
SAP AG
SAP became synonymous with ERP software, with products like SAP ERP, SAP BusinessObjects software, and most recently, Sybase mobile products and in-memory computing appliance SAP HANA. Today, more than 82,000 customers in more than 120 countries run SAP applications — from distinct solutions addressing the needs of small businesses and midsize companies to suite offerings for global organizations
Microsoft
The software giant doesn't require any introduction, with a slew of successful products that have revolutionized computing and impacted our every day lives-DOS, Windows, Office, Zune, Xbox Kinect, IE, Bing etc. It's said that when Windows 95 was launched, there were queues outside retail stores on the previous night to buy the product. It is said that the company sold $30 Million worth of copies of Windows 95 on the first day itself, and a million copies in the first four days of its launch.
Oracle Corporation
Oracle is the world's leading supplier of software for information management, and the world's second largest independent software company. And its success with RDBMS needs no explanation. The company's relational database was the world's first to support the SQL, now an industry standard. Today, the Oracle DBMS is supported on over 80 different operating environments. According to Oracle, it was the world's first software company to develop and deploy 100 percent Internet-enabled enterprise software across its entire product line: database, server, enterprise business applications, applications development and decision support tools.
Apple
When most companies were gaining or losing market share on products, more or less in the form of re-modifications, re-inventions, Apple was busy making ground for products that were earlier thought to exist in the realms of Sci-Fi films only. Apple is the company that gave the world its first GUI (Lisa), introduced many products that built communities no less powerful than religions cults, like the iPod that killed other MP3 players, the iPhone that took the mobile phone market by surprise with its completely touch screen technology, the iMac that completely re-defined the desktop, and now the iPad, which doesn't need any introduction. Apple made a major dent in the music distribution industry with its iTunes store that created a segment of consumers.
Seagate
A company that has been a storage player ever since its inception has many firsts to its credit, including the industry's first 7200 rpm hdd, the first 10,000 and 15000 RPM HDD, first Fibre Channel interface hard drive, etc. Seagate was the first to ship one billion hard drives in 2008. Seagate has constantly been involved with increasing the storage capacity of the HDDs, SSDs, etc.
EMC
The company formed by ex-Intel employees, EMC rose to dominance through its flagship product, an enterprise storage array known as Symmetrix. EMC is the largest provider of data storage platforms in the world. Its dominance in the virtualization space has grown manifold with the acquisition of VMware.
Novell
The company that really kicked in the client/server computing era was Novell, with its multi-platform network operating system, NetWare. In just a decade, the company had a monopoly in the x86 based network OS market. This position was later quashed by Microsoft with its Windows NT server OS, which made the job of setting up an office network a piece of cake with its user friendly, Windows 95 like GUI. Another major innovation by Novell was its Novell Directory Services or NDS.
1980s-Beginning of Client/Server Computing
Creative Technology
Creative is the company that introduced the famous Sound Blaster range of audio cards for PCs, and completely redefined the music experience you get on PCs. The company dominated the PC audio market till mid-1990's and early 2000s. After that, sound card functionality started coming built in with motherboards.
Symantec Corporation
Symantec is one of the largest software companies in the world, dealing in storage, security, and systems management. Its real success however has been in the security domain, thanks to its acquisition of Peter Norton Computing way back in 1990. During the merger, revenues by the Norton group accounted for only 20-25% of the overall company revenue, which completely reversed in just three years time, accounting to more than 80% of the company's revenues.
Research In Motion
The Canadian giant rose in popularity thanks to its impeccable push mail service for corporates, under the BlackBerry brand. Most high-flying corporate executives were seen carrying a BlackBerry handset so that they could get and respond to their emails anytime and from anywhere. Later, the proprietary Internet based IM service called the BlackBerry Messenger caught on like wild fire amongst the user community using the service through the BlackBerry PIN.
Cisco Systems
Cisco's name became synonymous to routers and networking. It wasn't the first company that developed the router, but rather the first commercially successful company to have sold multi-protocol routing products. The company managed to leverage the Internet wave of the late 1990s by creating a wide range of networking products for ISPs.
Dell
Dell has become a well-known brand today in the modern computing space, with hardware and software products and solutions for both enterprises and consumers. The real success for Dell came from its “Configure to order” approach to manufacturing, at a time when most other PC manufacturers were selling PCs to intermediaries in bulk. By pioneering the approach of selling custom configurations directly to customers, the company's founder, Michael Dell managed to catapult the company to the top as a leading supplier of PCs.
Adobe
Adobe systems revolutionized the desktop publishing business with Adobe PostScript, which was targeted at a new and beautiful method of printing text and images. Adobe is a company characterized through its ground breaking products like Illustrator and Photoshop, which raised the bar in terms of quality of print and video. Adobe also came out with the Adobe PDF technology which has become the de-facto in terms of document portability, sharing and collaboration. More than 75% of online videos are viewed using Adobe Flash technology, making Flash the #1 format for video on the web.
APC
(American Power Conversion) was founded in March 1981 by three electronic engineers from MIT. APC has become synonymous with quality power back-up and management solutions and is accredited to have revolutionised data centre power supply.
1990s --The Online Era
Red Hat
Red Hat built a significant business around the Linux OS, the free OS whose kernel was developed by Linus Torvalds in 1991. Later on, Red Hat became the largest corporate contributor to the development of the Linux kernel.
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Amazon.com
Amazon can be credited with the tag of being the first e-commerce company and pioneering the online retail business. Amazon started housing products in warehouses and selling them through its online website. The company initially only sold books through its online store but the recent line of products include books, music, videos, consumer electronics, clothing and household products. As of Q1 2011, Amazon has approximately 137 million active customers worldwide.
nVIDIA
The company can be credited with bringing professional level graphics processing to the masses. It developed and popularized the GPU, or graphics processing unit, based graphics cards, which completely wiped out the smaller, competing manufacturers. The only real competition it has today is from ATI (now AMD Graphics Technologies after AMD acquired it). The firm today provides GPU based cards, motherboards with embedded GPUs, and even processors to power the graphics in tablets, smartphones, etc.
Yahoo!
The 'Yet Another Heirarchical Officious Oracle', short for Yahoo! was brought into existence by two Stanford Electrical Engineering graduates-David Filo and Jerry Yang. It was created as a website named “David and Jerry's guide to the WWW”. The service grew rapidly throughout the 90's, offering a variety of online services, apart from search. Some of the notable services introduced by Yahoo!, which have impacted our lives include the Yahoo! Instant Messenger, and Yahoo! Mail.
eBay
While most e-commerce companies were finding success by selling their products to consumers over the Internet, eBay's claim to fame was that it became an online auction and shopping website, where buyers and sellers trade a wide variety of goods. The company today connects millions of buyers and sellers globally in the world's largest online marketplace, utilizing PayPal to ensure secure transactions. The company also operates specialized marketplaces such as StubHub, the world's largest ticket marketplace, and eBay Classifieds sites, which together have a presence in more than 1,000 cities around the world. With more than 97 million active users globally (as of Q2 2011), eBay is the world's largest online marketplace today.
Google came at a time when the Internet market was flooded with many different and powerful search engines, like Yahoo!, Altavista, Lycos, etc all trying to gain the top spot. In a short span of time, the search algorithms created by Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page completely overtook others and dominated the Internet. Google is amongst the most valuable brands and rated as amongst the best companies to work for. Beyond search engines, Google is also known for Gmail, Google Docs, Google Earth, and Android.
VMware
Virtualization was nothing new before it was introduced by VMware. The technology gained popularity because it was introduced at the right time, wherein the client/server computing era was getting plagued by the problem of server proliferation in data centers. VMware became a leading player to combat this issue by using virtualization to consolidate servers in the data center, thereby simplifying the IT infrastructure. The company was acquired by EMC in 2004.
2000 Onwards --The Next Web
Commonly referred to as the professional network, LinkedIn has come of age to pose a serious threat to all online job portals. It is essentially a social network with more 'professionalism' built in. Conversations are restricted to a more formal level where people post profiles about their work rather than personal info like they do in Facebook. 116 million people are registered for the service.
This social networking giant connects about 800 million users worldwide into a common networking platform. The website has become the single largest network of friends all over the world with no other network even worthy of being a distant second.
The 140 character long messages have been a huge hit with the masses and people can now freely express themselves through a tweet and talk about their daily chores. Twitter has also emerged as an effective method for marketing and customer care as people can now tweet about problems faced. More than 380 million users access the portal worldwide.