1. The Information Age
Congratulations! You live in the information age. 😎 That’s clear and obvious to everyone. But what does it mean? What opportunities and prospects does this bring? Let’s take a quick look back...
The 20th century was the industrial century. 🏭 Thousands of factories and plants were built in every country, along with power stations and nuclear plants. Humanity flew into space for the first time, and the first Mars rovers headed to Mars…
The largest companies were in manufacturing and electronics. In the 1980s, Japan almost overtook the US by GDP and nearly became the world’s largest economy. Japanese cars, electronics, ships, phones, and even game consoles (!) were considered the best in the world.
The biggest fortunes and companies were made in manufacturing. General Motors, Toyota, Volkswagen: if you worked in “industry,” you had a great career and excellent prospects.
Space, rockets, and technological singularity felt so close! It seemed that any moment flying cars would appear, humans would land on Mars, and even the slowest airplane would be supersonic. But none of that happened. Something went wrong.
Japan never became economy number one. No one landed on Mars, even though more than 50 (!) years have passed since the Moon landing. Commercial airplanes are flying slower and slower. We’re not seeing flying cars in the sky either. So what happened?
2. The Information Revolution
In the 1980s, the personal computer revolution happened, and in the 1990s the internet (the web) appeared. And the world changed forever.
First, geeks moved onto the internet, then young people, and now even an 80-year-old grandmother looks up the summer water shutoff schedule online 🤦♂️. Today, not just everything happens on the internet — absolutely everything! People study, work, relax, and meet there. In the US, for example, 60% of married couples met online.
If you want to find a partner — go online; to find a job — go online; want to study — go online. You can still die offline, but don’t forget to delete your browser history! :)
As Time magazine wrote 10 years ago, “If you’re not on the internet, you don’t exist.” And that was 10 years ago, before the pandemic! (I don’t know when you’re reading this text — maybe it would be more accurate to say before the First Pandemic?!) 😅
3. IT Companies in the 21st Century
Ten years ago, the world’s five largest IT companies were Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. Today, they are simply the five largest companies in the world. IT companies are now the biggest and the most valuable. And that’s because they don’t have millions of customers — they have billions!
Billions of people use these companies’ products. And if a billion customers each bring in $10 a month, that’s a tidy sum. That’s why IT companies aren’t just worth a lot — they’re worth an enormous amount 💰
They’re worth not billions, but trillions of dollars.
Imagine a company worth a billion dollars. Is that a lot? Yes. What if a company is worth $10 billion? That’s already a lot. A hundred billion? A gigantic sum.
Nvidia, at the time of writing, was worth $4 trillion. That’s 4,000 billion dollars.
- Nvidia — 4,035 billion
- Microsoft — 3,742 billion
- Apple — 3,190 billion
- Amazon — 2,410 billion
- Google — 2,204 billion
Google, in its “pauperish” fifth place, is worth only 2,200 billion dollars. And you still don’t want to go into IT? 🚀
By the way, many IT companies pay their employees in stock in addition to salary. For example, Amazon can pay a Senior Software Engineer a salary of $200k a year, plus $100k in stock. After 3 years, that stock can be worth $300k, so working as a programmer at Amazon, you could make up to $500k a year. And you still don’t want to become a programmer?
Internet companies grow very fast because they don’t need to open new branches — everything happens online. Uber doesn’t own a single car, yet it’s valued at $195 billion. Airbnb doesn’t own apartments, yet it’s valued at $105 billion. Booking doesn’t own hotels, yet it’s valued at $183 billion. Folks, go into IT: great atmosphere, fantastic prospects. 😇
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