Picture this: It’s 1996, and your landline phone is finally free. You sit down in front of your bulky computer and use your modem to connect to the internet via a dial-up connection. It takes a several minutes, but you’re finally greeted with a “you’ve got mail” message. After carefully reading your three new emails, you start surfing the web—a treasure trove of roughly 100,000 sites. You decide to check out McKinsey.com, which went live on February 29 and already averages 350 visits per day from users in 20 countries. McKinsey.com and the internet have certainly come a long way, but excitement—and criticism—of new technologies are as strong as they were nearly three decades ago. “When a lot of new technologies come out into the world, commentators subject them to all kinds of criticism,” Marc Andreessen, who developed the graphic web browser that opened the world’s eyes to the potential of the internet, told senior partner and chief marketing officer Tracy Francis in a recent interview. “The original laptop computer was the size of a briefcase that weighed 40 pounds. And an early review in the New York Times said, basically, ‘Who on Earth is going to carry a 40-pound brick home?’ They just didn’t envision the engineering that would shrink it into what we have today.” On McKinsey.com’s 27th birthday, explore some timeless articles from our Classics archives, and then dive into insights that explore the future of tech.
LOOK BACK
The ‘moment of truth’ in customer service
Building the civilized workplace
LOOK AHEAD
The state of AI in 2022—and a half decade in review
McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2022