"Revolutionary" is such a subjective term. Very, very few ideas are actually novel. In fact, dreaming them up is usually easier than pulling them off, so give

"Revolutionary" is such a subjective term. Very, very few ideas are actually novel. In fact, dreaming them up is usually easier than pulling them off, so give Apple & Google some credit. While they aren't inventing the future from scratch, they certainly deserve credit for bringing the future into the present. Multi-touch interfaces and tablets have been around for years and the ideas for them even longer (see: Star Trek), but no one has been able to figure out how to successfully pull it off and popularize it. Apple did. Automated cars have been the future since the Jetsons, and we're going to see it become a reality in the next decade, thanks to Google. We've been talking about "digital libraries" and having the world's knowledge at your fingertips for the last 100 years. Wikipedia figured that one out. The future is (mostly) already laid out, the roads just need to be paved to get everyone there. That is what Apple & Google are doing, along with some others. Edit: Just realized we actually used to have (dumb) automated cars. They were called horses.