Everybody knows the main products that Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, Google, and Amazon ship — their flagship products you interact with daily, or perhaps more often. What you don’t know is that you also interact with products they sell, give away, or sponsor virtually every time you get online.

Amazon actually generates more profit from their web services (AWS) than from their retail sales!

Both Google and Meta/Facebook have made significant, public tools available in AI, along with important research.

These are not technologies you know that you interact with, but I do, because they are foundational to the modern underpinnings of the Internet and the web. They may not all be sold or given away with philanthropic intent, but they do contribute meaningfully to our lives — and specifically to my livelihood.

Here, I do NOT render a verdict on the companies as a whole. No organization of these sizes can be easily measured morally, ethically, or otherwise. But this is a series of things I am grateful for. I am grateful for their technological achievements.

There are many others who have made equal or greater contributions to the technology that underpins our lives, but I will save some of those for another post.

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I turned 40 in December and it’s left me thinking about a lot of things, but especially the number of things I am grateful for. I want to list 40 of those over the next few weeks, things that either shaped where I am and things that are actively with me today.

There is no particular order, this is part of that series.