Technology
Timeline: The March to a Billion Users [Chart]
![Timeline: The March to a Billion Users [Chart]](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/the-race-to-1-billion-users-chart.png)
The March to a Billion Users
How long did it take for each app to hit the 1B mark?
The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.
With approximately 3.3 billion people now using the internet, how hard can it possibly be to reach one billion of them each month?
It turns out that it’s quite a challenge.
Apple, the largest company by market capitalization, doesn’t have a single product with that kind of penetration.
WeChat, which is the most popular mobile messaging app in China, couldn’t reach one billion active users even if it was used by every single person with a smartphone in China. That’s why the app “only” has 650 million active users right now.
Meanwhile, names such as Reddit, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram all boast hundreds of millions of users. However, none of these are able to yet have the global market penetration to reach the coveted billion mark.
The Big Three
So far, the only companies in possession of apps or programs with more than one billion active users are Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
Amazingly, Google alone has seven of them: Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Android, Chrome, and Play. The last of these to reach the one billion mark was Gmail, as per Alphabet’s announcement earlier this month during an earnings call.
Google also has the app that reached one billion users the quickest: Android did it in only 5.8 years.
Facebook also has three apps that can make the billion user claim. Facebook itself has the largest audience out of all of these apps, with 1.59 billion monthly active users. WhatsApp, which Facebook bought for $22 billion in October 2014, has also recently announced on its blog that it also surpassed the one billion user mark. This now fulfills a promise that Mark Zuckerberg made to Facebook shareholders at the deal’s outset.
Lastly, there’s Microsoft’s Windows and Office products, which are the only paid products that could crack the list. They took the longest to get there: 25.8 years and 21.7 years respectively.
Brands
How Tech Logos Have Evolved Over Time
From complete overhauls to more subtle tweaks, these tech logos have had quite a journey. Featuring: Google, Apple, and more.
How Tech Logos Have Evolved Over Time
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One would be hard-pressed to find a company that has never changed its logo. Granted, some brands—like Rolex, IBM, and Coca-Cola—tend to just have more minimalistic updates. But other companies undergo an entire identity change, thus necessitating a full overhaul.
In this graphic, we visualized the evolution of prominent tech companies’ logos over time. All of these brands ranked highly in a Q1 2024 YouGov study of America’s most famous tech brands. The logo changes are sourced from 1000logos.net.
How Many Times Has Google Changed Its Logo?
Google and Facebook share a 98% fame rating according to YouGov. But while Facebook’s rise was captured in The Social Network (2010), Google’s history tends to be a little less lionized in popular culture.
For example, Google was initially called “Backrub” because it analyzed “back links” to understand how important a website was. Since its founding, Google has undergone eight logo changes, finally settling on its current one in 2015.
| Company | Number of Logo Changes |
|---|---|
| 8 | |
| HP | 8 |
| Amazon | 6 |
| Microsoft | 6 |
| Samsung | 6 |
| Apple | 5* |
Note: *Includes color changes. Source: 1000Logos.net
Another fun origin story is Microsoft, which started off as Traf-O-Data, a traffic counter reading company that generated reports for traffic engineers. By 1975, the company was renamed. But it wasn’t until 2012 that Microsoft put the iconic Windows logo—still the most popular desktop operating system—alongside its name.
And then there’s Samsung, which started as a grocery trading store in 1938. Its pivot to electronics started in the 1970s with black and white television sets. For 55 years, the company kept some form of stars from its first logo, until 1993, when the iconic encircled blue Samsung logo debuted.
Finally, Apple’s first logo in 1976 featured Isaac Newton reading under a tree—moments before an apple fell on his head. Two years later, the iconic bitten apple logo would be designed at Steve Jobs’ behest, and it would take another two decades for it to go monochrome.
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