When the 21st century began Apple was just a few years removed from near bankruptcy, Microsoft, after a few wasted years fighting off a Department of Justice eager to neuter it, was on the verge of a fifteen-year span during which its share price almost literally stood still, Google was a small private company reliant on word of mouth about its nascent search engine, Amazon was a peddler of books, CDs, VHS videos and DVDs (its shares were soon to plummet into the $1 range), and Facebook didn’t even exist. Founder Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school.