On 24th November 2003, Mirata Ltd was founded. The internet then was nothing like it is now. Mobile phones still mostly made calls. The idea of carrying the entire web in your pocket would have sounded like science fiction. The pace of what’s happened in twenty years still catches me off-guard when I stop to think about it.
We started out designing and building hardware, with bespoke learning tools meant to work across schools, businesses and homes. It didn’t take long to realise that the only constant in this industry was going to be change, and that we’d either learn to move with it or get left behind.
The web browser ended up at the heart of everything we did. It still is. What’s changed is what the browser can now do.
What two decades of web change actually looked like
Twenty years ago, “interactive” mostly meant a form and a submit button. Today, entire applications run inside the browser, often more capably than the desktop software they replaced. The path from there to here ran through:
- The rise of JavaScript frameworks (Angular, React, Vue) that made dynamic, app-like interfaces possible.
- Responsive design, which finally meant websites worked on phones as well as desktops.
- HTML5 and CSS3, which gave us the modern web’s grammar.
- The explosion of APIs, which turned the web into a system of connected services rather than a collection of isolated sites.
- HTTPS becoming a baseline expectation, not an upgrade.
None of that was inevitable. Each shift required someone to bet early that it mattered.
The bigger picture beyond the browser
Outside the web itself, the wider technology landscape has moved even further. A handful of innovations have reshaped what businesses, governments, and individuals can actually do:
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning. The headline story of recent years, but it’s been quietly shaping search, recommendations, fraud detection and medical imaging for far longer.
- Cloud computing. Twenty years ago, you bought servers. Now you rent compute by the second. The shift sounds technical, but the consequences have been profound for how anyone builds anything.
- Mobile and 5G. The pocket-sized supercomputer changed expectations forever. Faster networks have only deepened the dependency.
- The Internet of Things. Smart homes, connected industrial equipment, sensors in the soil. The boundary between digital and physical keeps blurring.
- Cybersecurity. As everything has moved online, the threats have moved with it. The good news is that defence has matured. The bad news is that the attackers have too.
There are other big stories sitting alongside these: blockchain, biotech and CRISPR, renewable energy, autonomous vehicles, AR and VR. Each one matters. None of them has finished playing out.
What we’re thinking about for the next chapter
So what does the next stretch look like for a small tech company like ours? A few things are on our mind:
- Stay close to what’s emerging. Not every shiny new technology is worth chasing, but you have to know enough to tell. AI in particular is rewriting the rulebook for software development right now.
- Build sustainably. Tech has a real environmental cost, from data centres to device manufacturing. Doing this responsibly matters more every year, not less.
- Keep a culture that questions itself. The teams that survive these shifts are the ones that don’t fall in love with their own past decisions.
- Take security seriously. Not as a checkbox, as a discipline. Customer data is borrowed, not owned.
- Find good partners. Nobody navigates this alone. The right collaborations make the impossible feel ordinary.
Twenty years in, the most useful thing I’ve learned is that the technology is the easy part. The harder, slower work is staying curious, staying humble enough to keep learning, and building things that actually serve people.
So as you look at the technology around you, what’s exciting you about the next decade, and what’s already changed in ways you haven’t fully caught up with yet?