The seventh decade of McKinsey’s journey, from 1986 to 1996, saw both a societal and technological upheaval. This is when technology stopped being a back-office tool and became the foundation of our everyday lives; people didn’t carry minicomputers in their pockets yet, but the stones were laid for that foundation.
Earlier decades made computers smaller, more personal, and more affordable. This decade wired them together and paved their future path into the mobile world. The invention of the World Wide Web, the rise of enterprise software, and the release of the first commercial mobile phones transformed not just how organizations operated but how people participated in the global economy.
The broader backdrop was one of rapid economic expansion and mounting competitive pressure. Companies in Asia, Europe, and North America were grappling with globalization, deregulation, and the growing realization that information itself could be a source of competitive advantage.
Today’s technology leaders making difficult decisions about how to implement AI can draw parallels to that decade, when everything digital was new. AI is a new general-purpose technology arriving so fast that most organizations still can’t fully understand it or easily derive value from it. Almost all companies are using AI, but many are still figuring out how to build their operating models, business processes, and customer experiences around it.
The web opens the world
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at CERN in Geneva, proposed a system for sharing information across a global network of computers. By 1991, the World Wide Web was publicly available. What followed was one of the fastest, and most cataclysmic, technology adoptions in history. In 1993, the Mosaic browser made navigating the web accessible to nontechnical users for the first time. A year later, Netscape released its Navigator browser, and the commercial internet was born. By 1995, Amazon and eBay had launched, and Yahoo had become the web’s dominant directory, a precursor to search. Entire industries that had operated on analog, paper-based models suddenly faced competitors with no stores, no physical inventory, and no geographic limits.
The speed of that transition caught many established businesses unprepared. Companies that had built durable advantages through physical distribution and supplier relationships found that those advantages counted for less in a world where information flowed freely and switching costs dropped to near zero. The web did not just add a new channel—it rewrote the economics of entire markets.
100 years of technology innovation
As McKinsey celebrates its centenary in 2026, this series explores the defining technologies of each decade and the lessons they offer for today’s technology leaders.
Enterprise software becomes the business operating system
The same decade that brought the public internet also saw the rise of enterprise software as the backbone of how people did knowledge work and how companies interacted with clients, customers, and partners. In 1992, SAP released R/3, a client-server enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that allowed large companies to run finance, manufacturing, procurement, and human resources on a single integrated platform. Oracle, PeopleSoft, and others followed with their own client-server ERP suites.
At the same time, Microsoft was completing the transformation of office work. Windows 3.1, released in 1992, and Windows 95, released three years later, brought the graphical interface to mainstream business computers. First released in 1990, Microsoft Office later standardized how hundreds of millions of people created and shared information at work. Through enterprise software, computing had become the universal infrastructure of modern business.
Many of the legacy systems that chief information officers are now struggling to modernize were implemented during this decade—purpose-built for the processes and business models of the 1990s and deeply embedded in organizational workflows ever since. Building the foundations for agentic AI at scale often means confronting precisely this inherited tech debt. The companies that will gain the most from AI are those willing to rethink architecture from the ground up, rather than adding new capabilities on top of aging foundations. They will build symbiotic enterprise systems that combine human and machine intelligence.
Mobile phones debut
This decade also saw the introduction of the first widely available mobile phones. If the mid-1980s were dominated by heavy, expensive analogue “bricks” like the Motorola DynaTAC, the mid-1990s brought affordable, pocket-size digital handsets to the masses. The pivotal shift came in 1991 with the launch of 2G/GSM networks across Europe. Nokia seized the moment by launching the world’s first mass-produced GSM phone in 1992. They were just for making voice calls, but for the first time, business could happen anywhere. The fixed geography of offices and landlines began to loosen, and with it, assumptions about how work was structured.
When winning means changing course
Not every company navigated the decade’s disruptions successfully. Commodore International, which had dominated the home computer market in the early 1980s with the Commodore 64, is one of the starkest examples. At its peak, the Commodore 64 was the best-selling personal computer in the world. But as the IBM PC-compatible standard consolidated market power, and Microsoft locked in its position as the dominant software platform, Commodore struggled to respond. A persistent belief that technical superiority would win over market dynamics ended with the company filing for bankruptcy in April 1994.
The cautionary lesson for leaders is that technology on its own does not deliver value. Commodore had genuine engineering talent. What it lacked was the organizational discipline to make hard choices—about platforms, partnerships, and which customer segments to prioritize—before the market made those choices for it. That challenge resonates clearly in the AI era. Technology leaders face tough decisions on which AI capabilities to build in-house, which platforms to commit to, and how to ensure investments lead to economic gains. And they must make these decisions quickly or competitors will do so before them.
What leaders can learn
The decade from 1986 to 1996 was when technology first demonstrated its power to redraw entire competitive landscapes, not gradually, but at speed. In today’s AI era, the organizations best positioned to win won’t be those with the largest budgets or the most pilots, but those that connect new AI capabilities to their own data, workflows, and people in ways that create real value.
The leadership lesson from that digital gold rush decade is ultimately a simple one: Technology alone won’t remake industries, but how companies apply it will. Amazon launched in 1995 and soon had many competitors, but only one Amazon stands today: the one that recognized the web was not just a sales channel but a new architecture for growth.
Chandrasekhar Panda is a partner in McKinsey’s Riyadh office, Henning Soller is a partner in the Frankfurt office, Klemens Hjartar is a senior partner in the Copenhagen office, and Sven Blumberg is a senior partner in the Düsseldorf office.