Apple, Facebook, Netflix among biggest disrupters of the 21st century
The world is unrecognisable from how we lived at the turn of the century - including one behemoth that had the most immature beginnings.
Money
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It’s the year 2000.
You’ve just booked a taxi via a landline to go on a holiday after buying physical tickets from a travel agent.
Once you get to wherever you’re going, you cling to a map like flotation devices. You take photos using fragile film that then has to be carted to chemists or photo labs to be printed to actually see.
Friday nights mean stressful dashes to Video Ezys and then the sour disappointment of finding the VHS you wanted was out.
If you want to access the internet, it means having to listen to the wail of dial-up and then waiting. So much waiting.
To celebrate the launch of the new news.com.au app, we’re celebrating the people, places and events we’ll never forget from the first quarter of the 21st century by asking for Australia’s view. Our 25@25 series will finally put to bed the debates you’ve been having at the pub and around dinner tables for years – and some that are just too much fun not to include.
In 2000, the majority of Australians didn’t have mobile phones (only 45 percent) and two thirds didn’t have home internet access. Today, there are nearly 40 million mobile connections, which works out at roughly two per Aussie adult.
The world today bears so little resemblance to that. There is no part of our lives that is untouched by incredible, and incredibly fast, techno-isation of the way we shop, date, travel, listen to music, holiday, and even buy toilet paper.
Gutenberg had his printing press; we have Prime and the algorithm.
Nearly all of the companies and brands that are fundamental, immutable, unshakeable, non-negotiable parts of our lives in 2025 didn’t exist back at the turn of the millennium, when Sydney was busy hosting the Olympic Games and Britney Spears was still being called an ingénue.
So - which one do you think has changed your life the most?
In the early aughties, in a dorm room in Harvard, a freshman coded away, creating a handy way to rank the hotness of fellow students, an offering that would morph into Facebook, and in doing so create an industry that has been blamed for everything from inciting racial violence to skyrocketing rates of youth mental health distress.
Facebook itself might have long lost its youthful disruptor edge, with the kids having since migrated to other platforms, but there would be no Instagram, no X (formerly Twitter) and no TikTok if Zuckerberg had not been so keen on finding a way to rate the bang-ability of his classmates.
While there were social media sites before Facebook, it was Zuckerberg’s baby that ushered in the social media revolution.
Today social media is how we communicate, express ourselves, stay in contact, and connect with loved ones and influencers flogging dubious tooth-whitening products. Aussies spent about 14 billion hours on social media last year.
Facebook’s parent company Meta has achieved even greater global cultural domination than when McDonalds started exporting golden arches.
Four out of five people on this planet, outside of China, use a Meta product every day.
Its birth has also had unthinkable consequences.
The Russians weaponised it to sow disinformation during the 2016 US election.
In 2018, Facebook admitted the platform had been used to incite violence in Myanmar. The year before, the country’s military unleashed a sweeping campaign of massacres, rape, and arson, according to Human Rights Watch.
In 2021, President Joe Biden accused Facebook and social media platforms of “killing people”.
Last year US research found that nearly half of all teens think social media has had a mostly negative effect on their age group.
Apple
Yes, the iconic computing brand is the only one that existed back in 2000 but in a completely different incarnation.
There were no white, temple-like stores and all they made were computers either of the bulky lap or desk variety. It would be a full year before skivvy-clad wünder founder Steve Jobs would release the iPod in 2001 and seven years before they got into the phone business.
However, that would perhaps be the defining technological leap of the millennium and it is hard to convey how profoundly Apple products have reshaped the world.
The advent of the iPhone put more computing power in our pockets than what powered NASA rockets in the 80s and meant there was nowhere we could or should go without being perpetually tethered to the ol’ information superhighway.
Without the Jobsian revolution, we would not have apps and we would not carry the internet in our pockets. They were the first trillion dollar company for a reason.
Netflix
For a company that not so much disrupted the $480 billion global movie and TV business but overturned it like a Real Housewife on a table-flipping bender, Netflix started life as a company that sent out rented DVDs in the mail.
In 2007 CEO Reed Hastings had the brilliant idea of this thing called ‘streaming’ where you could watch whatever you wanted and whenever you wanted, replacing appointment viewing with the free-for-all binge.
The numbers today are wild: Globally, we watched 188 billion hours of Netflix last year and the behemoth has won 26 Oscars in less than a decade.
Airbnb
The original concept now seems laughable - with hotels in San Francisco at a premium, two young chaps figured they could rent out blow up mattresses on their apartment floor.
Today that concept has morphed into the Airbnb monster that is worth $121 billion.
It has changed the way we travel irrevocably.
Some say that has come at a high cost in places like Venice and Lisbon, accused of pricing out locals and thereby eroding the populace of these historic cities.
But still, it’s like so handy, so…
Amazon
Who would have thought that once weedy bookseller Jeff Bezos would end up as one of the world’s richest men and that he would revolutionise shopping and all consumer behaviour forevermore?
In 1995 he launched the now ubiquitous site to help Americans get their copies of John Grisham and Nora Roberts novels faster and cheaper and along the way built the most monster-sized, Goliath of a retailer in human history.
The Amazon store in Australia stocks hundreds of millions of products, it has been claimed. Bezos’ baby has trained us to expect near immediacy and next-day delivery, to be impatient consumers who can have a new loo brush on our doorstep in under 12 hours.
However, did we survive before?
Tinder
What Amazon did for shopping, Tinder did for dating, meaning we could undertake formerly out-of-the-house activities from the comfort of our sofa.
Thanks to Tinder, love (or lust or everything and anything in between) was no longer something that had to be sought out in crowded bars on Friday nights or at horrendous things like singles salsa nights.
On-demand dates were here.
Critics have accused Tinder and the swathe of similar apps that have followed in its wake, of making dating feel disposable and superficial and that it is that much harder to find a genuine connection; supporters point out the vastly expanded dating pool on tap.
However, based on US estimates, there are now about one million partnered Australians who met on platforms like Tinder. Or should I say, they got their appily ever after.
Spotify
What Netflix did for tele, Spotify did for radio, making every song, ever, immediately available, a gluttonous aural overload that has changed the lives of music lovers and musicians, for better and worse.
The Swedish-born company’s 678 million users can listen to Ace of Base’s All
That She Wants any time day or night.
It also means that artists can earn as little as about $0.005 per stream.
Uber
Imagine the horror of having to get into a taxi and a) have to know a specific address and b) find your wallet at the end?
And in a strange city? Where you don’t speak the language?
What Uber has done is make travel and moving about the world seamless in a way we now take for granted, offering a way to navigate streets foreign and domestic without having to get behind the wheel or find a bus timetable.
The real test? ‘Uber’ Is now both a (new) verb and a noun.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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Originally published as Apple, Facebook, Netflix among biggest disrupters of the 21st century
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