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The First Available USB Drive
M-Systems invented the first "thumb drive", with a capacity of 8 MB. IBM bought these products from them, and were the first to market them in North America. -
Mac OS X
Apple released their next proprietary Operating System for their line of Mac products, replacing Classic Mac OS. This improved upon Classic Mac visually, but it was reportedly very poor performance-wise. -
Gmail
Gmail is released to the public as a beta, and it explodes in popularity. It opens the door for almost anybody to use their e-mail for free, and in a simple format. Today, it has over 1.2 billion users. -
Release of Windows Vista
Microsoft finally released their successor to Windows XP, and this was the longest timespan between OS releases. It received mostly negative reception throughout most of its lifespan due to much higher hardware requirements, and paved the way for competitors to gain more foothold in the market. -
Google Chrome
Google releases their stable public version of their own browser, made of open-source components from Apple and Mozilla. chrome is now the most widely-used browser, with most recent reports of 68% of people worldwide use it as their default.