Mmm, salty
Legend has it that the potato chip was born on Aug. 24, 1853, at the Moon Lake Lodge in Saratoga, N.Y. There, transportation magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt unintentionally inspired chef George Crum when he complained that his fried potatoes were too thick and soggy. After his second effort was also rejected, Crum retaliated by slicing a potato wafer-thin and frying the slices crisp with salt. The potato chip was born, and it was delicious.
Today, potato chips account for $6 billion in annual sales in the United States (and are projected to be worth more than $10 billion in annual sales by 2015), and accounted for at least $16 billion in annual worldwide sales in 2005. The largest potato chip brand by far is PepsiCo, Inc. (NYSE:PEP)‘s Lays, which account for at least $2 billion in annual sales across all varieties, according to Grocery Headquarters.
Start me up
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) was already 100 million users strong when it launched Windows 95 on Aug. 24, 1995. Still, the hot software company (its shares had already grown in price by more than 6,000% in the nine years since its IPO) spared no expense to tell the world that it was time to upgrade.
The company set aside $300 million for marketing the new operating system, which was the first to unify Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s earlier Windows user interfaces with programs and features still designed for MS-DOS. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) spent $12 million just to acquire the rights to the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up,” which became Windows 95’s theme song. Millions more went toward printing 1.5 million free Microsoft-branded copies of the London Times, crafting a 300-foot-long Windows 95 banner to hang from Toronto’s CN Tower, and creating a light show that wrapped New York City’s Empire State Building in the company’s colors.
Still, the expense was expected to pay off — 20% of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s 100 million users were expected to upgrade with the $90 OS within a year, which would have easily resulted in more than $500 million in profit for the famously high-margin company. Indeed, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) vastly exceeded that figure by the end of the following year, as its 1996 net income topped out at $2.5 billion. Thousands of newspaper stories, TV news segments, radio spots, and national magazine cover stories combined to ensure that hundreds of millions of people knew about Windows 95.
The hoopla certainly helped boost surging computer sales, too. An estimated 238 million computers were in use in 1995, and by the turn of the century, that number doubled to 558 million computers. It also shot Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) to the top of the dot-com bubble, and it became the largest American company of all time by the end of 1999. The five years that followed Windows 95’s launch saw Microsoft’s shares rise over 800% more, and exactly five years later they still held a 500% gain over the launch day of Windows 95. Although Microsoft ceased supporting Windows 95 in 2001, it’s continued to grow its user base ever since — there are now well over a billion PCs running various versions of Windows around the world.
The article The First Day of the Greatest Bull Market in History originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Alex Planes.
Fool contributor Alex Planes holds no financial position in any company mentioned here. Add him on Google+ or follow him on Twitter, @TMFBiggles, for more insight into markets, history, and technology.The Motley Fool recommends PepsiCo and owns shares of Microsoft and PepsiCo.
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