How Enterprise Is Built, One Product at a Time

Produced by the Ford Motor Company from 1908 to 1927, the Model T's manufacture on a moving assembly line cut production costs enough to make car ownership affordable to the American middle class for the first time, selling roughly 15 million units.

Visa's payment network traces back to BankAmericard, a credit card program Bank of America launched in 1958, eighteen years before the business was spun off and renamed Visa.

Introduced by the Haloid Xerox company in 1959, the Xerox 914 was the first successful plain paper office photocopier, and its runaway commercial success is credited with launching the modern office photocopier industry.

The first portable cassette player in Sony's Walkman line reached the market in July 1979 and created the mass consumer market for private, mobile listening to recorded music.

Microsoft first released Windows in November 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS, years before Windows 3.0 and Windows 95 made it the dominant operating system on personal computers worldwide.

Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded Netflix in 1997 as a DVD by mail rental business, a full decade before the company launched the streaming video service that eventually replaced it.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google Search in September 1998, built around the PageRank algorithm that ranked web pages by the links pointing to them.

Mark Zuckerberg and fellow Harvard students launched Facebook in February 2004 restricted to college students, only opening to the general public in 2006.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in January 2007, combining a mobile phone, a touchscreen media player and an internet communications device in a single handset for the first time.

Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick founded Uber in San Francisco in 2011 as UberCab, pioneering the mainstream app based ride hailing model and the wider gig economy pattern it relies on.