Has the “pace of technology” really picked up in the last 10 years though?

In 2012:

- Apple and Google were the dominant mobile platforms

- Microsoft was dominant on the desktop

- Amazon was the dominant retailer and the dominant (but nascent cloud provider)

- Google was the dominant search engine and YouTube was dominant

- Facebook was the dominant social network

-Microsoft has been one of the top five companies by market cap since 2000 and Apple has been in the top 5 since 2011.

- Intel is still the top PC processor manufacturer.

If you saw a modern smart phone in 2022, would you really be impressed with the iPhone 12 ProMax compared to the iPhone 5s?

I was using a 2 year old Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz Dell with 8GB RAM, gigabit Ethernet and a 1920x1200 (not a typo) screen. That computer can still run the latest version of Office and Chrome today.

In other words, the landscape hasn’t changed that much.

Now compare 2012-2002.

Have there been any new widely successful tech companies emerging since Facebook in 2009?

Amazon. AWS was just a small cloud on the horizon in 2012. They are the dominant platform to run applications and (more surprisingly) now the #2 DBMS vendor according to recent Gartner numbers. That's a major change. [0]

https://blogs.gartner.com/merv-adrian/2022/04/16/dbms-market...

"Have there been any new widely successful tech companies emerging since Facebook in 2009?"

Isn't Cloudflare an obvious example?

They’ve lost money for the past five quarters.

Your old computer running newer versions of Chrome and Office is a feature, not a bug. More efficient software is better software

I’ve never known anyone who called Chrome or Office efficient.

I’m not saying either is bad software.