Happy birthday, Google!

As the BBC and, doubtless, almost everybody else in the online information game is pointing out, google turns ten years old this weekend, a milestone marked among other things by the release of its new internet browser, Chrome (well, that was yesterday, but it's close enough).

For a company to move within a decade from zero to a quarterly turnover of $5.7bn (£3.2bn), with net quarterly profit of $1.25bn, seems like a thoroughly modern experience—a phenomenon enabled by the almost unlimited proliferation of products and services that people are willing to buy, sell and, crucially, advertise online. Even the previous generation of tech miracles didn't happen like this. In 1985, ten years after it was founded, Microsoft was on the cusp of releasing its Windows operating system and had enjoyed huge success in the (still relatively small) world of computing with its DOS operating system. But it was still a year away from going public, and its turnover was less than $163m. Its founders, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, were barely millionaires. According to Forbes's latest list of the world's billionaires, google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are now worth $18.7bn and $18.6bn respectively. Admittedly, adding them together still leaves you quite a few billion shy of Bill Gates's current $58bn. But he's had 23 more years and one internet revolution to consolidate.

Delve back still further into the mists of time, and you'll see exactly why such growth is unprecedented. Henry Ford founded his automobile company in 1903, and by 1913 its production of the Model T—the world's first mass-produced car—was running at over 200,000 units a year. It was an unprecedented industrial success, and allowed Ford to sell cars that year at the astonishingly low price of $550. Assuming every car he made that year was sold at full price, Ford's 1913 revenue can thus be approximated to $11m, which adjusting for inflation would have been worth around $245m today. Ford was working at the peak of technology, on a scale that had never been seen before. Yet today, that peak is a mere footnote to a foothill—and Google is grossing more than $319m a week (according to last year's accounts).

So companies are bigger now, and can grow faster, than ever? Well, yes. Yet a glance at one of the world's first incorporated companies is somewhat sobering. Born in 1600, the Honorable East India Company of Great Britain began as a trading venture for British merchants wishing to exploit the riches of Southeast Asia. Pause a century or so, and it had become an entity which—as Nick Robins concisely puts it over at OpenDemocracy—"ruled over a fifth of the world's people, generated a revenue greater than the whole of Britain and commanded a private army a quarter of a million strong." If google's disconcertingly cheery blog and "don't be evil" ethos are a front for this kind of empire-building, they're doing an awfully good job of keeping it quiet…