We’re posting a series of vignettes to celebrate Salesforce’s 20th birthday. Follow our digital scrapbook to get a behind the scenes glimpse of our history.

Change. Evolution. Transformation. These are all words you’ve come across again and again if you regularly read business articles and content. However, at the risk of sounding like an old hipster meme, Salesforce has been talking about helping customers with their digital transformations and delivering faster impact to businesses for well over a decade now. Recently, I stumbled across an old promo video for the Lightning Platform, and saw that paving the way for change through customer success and innovation has been a conversation we’ve been having for a long time.

Hello, Platform as a Service

In 2007, we introduced Force.com (now the Lightning Platform) to the world, a new Platform as a Service (PaaS). For the first time, developers could take the natural step in extending Salesforce’s Software as a Service (SaaS) capabilities, by creating their own custom applications. By having the infrastructure needed to develop and run applications over the Internet, cloud platforms eliminated the expense and complexity of managing all the hardware and software that used to be needed for such applications. In short: PaaS reduces costs and increases the speed of development and deployment.

This video — one of the early uploads to our Youtube channel — tells the story of how computing and the Internet changed how the world does business.

Inspired by Cultural Anthropology Professor Michael Wesch’s Web 2.0 video, the Force.com video shows viewers the possibilities that change brings — from customizations, to language translations, to integrations, and more all in real time.

Today, the Lightning Platform is still empowering everyone to build apps fast — not just developers — and helping companies transform the customer experience.