Slack: how a failed online game left behind a $27.7bn chat tool
Tiny Speck closed its game Glitch in December 2012, built Slack from its internal chat tool, and sold the company to Salesforce for $27.7…
Instagram: how a cluttered check-in app became a $1bn Facebook deal
Instagram's founders cut their check-in app Burbn down to photos, launched in October 2010 and sold to Facebook for $1 billion in April 2012…
LEGO: how a toymaker losing $1m a day became the world’s biggest
LEGO lost almost $1 million a day in 2003 and carried debt near $800 million, then cut its range, sold its parks and by…
IBM: Lou Gerstner scraps the breakup plan and keeps the company whole
Gerstner took IBM's top job in April 1993 after losses of about $8.1 billion, rejected a plan to split the company, and left in…
Microsoft: Satya Nadella moves the company from Windows to the cloud
After 18,000 job cuts in July 2014, Nadella made cloud services Microsoft's core; Azure passed $75 billion in revenue in 2025 and market value…
Amazon: Prime, a $79 yearly fee for unlimited two-day delivery
In 2005 Amazon launched Prime at $79 a year for unlimited two-day shipping, despite doubts it could pay; by 2021 Bezos claimed 200 million…
Amazon: how a retailer turned its own infrastructure into AWS
Amazon launched S3 in March 2006 and EC2 that August, and by 2025 AWS reported 128.7 billion dollars of sales and 45.6 billion of…
Apple: how the iPhone entered a market led by Nokia, and sold a million in 74 days
Apple, a maker of Macs and iPods, unveiled the iPhone in January 2007 and sold 1,389,000 of them in fiscal 2007, against Nokia's 437.1…
Nokia: how the world’s largest phone maker ended up selling its handset business to Microsoft
Nokia sold 437.1 million devices in 2007 and held 38% of the market, yet in 2013 it sold its handset business to Microsoft for…
Kodak: how the inventor of the digital camera ended up in bankruptcy
Kodak engineer Steven Sasson built a digital camera in 1975, yet the company that held about 89 per cent of US film sales in…
