Every platform revolution—the Personal Computer, the Internet and the Mobile phone—ushered in a wave of disruptive business applications. We know, we were there at some of the most influential companies making it happen. Each built from the ground up, natively tailored to each platform, each did so much more than introduce new features; they abstracted complexity and accelerated productivity in ways only imagined and fundamentally redefined how work got done.
The Personal Computer brought us Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. Before these apps, complex calculations and document creation were painstakingly manual, consuming hours or even days for what we could consider the most basic of tasks today. Windows introduced Microsoft Office and Outlook, merging essential apps like word processing, spreadsheets, and email into a unified suite, where before users juggled disconnected apps from different vendors, creating fragmented workflows data silos, and incompatible file types.
The Internet and the Cloud brought us Salesforce and Google Workspace, integrating real-time collaboration, sales, and customer management into the core of business operations. Previously, working on files as a group was clumsy and universal access to content was limited.
The Mobile Revolution introduced the idea that you could have a computer and access to the entire Internet in your pocket. For businesses, it meant a new way to reach out to customers and great efficiency. Today it’s hard to imagine a world where information is at your fingertips and you do everything from buy a train ticket with it to purchasing a car online.
Sure, it’s easy to use the most successful applications in history as examples. But it’s intentional. These apps were not just about technology, they created new paradigms of working. They were more than tools. They abstracted old complexities with entirely new ways of thinking about how to solve complex problems. They changed the world.