The world doesn't shift on a single axis. It tilts on a thousand different points of pressure at once. For the industry, the first tremor was OmniRetail’s seismic announcement. For me, it was the quiet hum of the server racks in Apex Tech’s primary data center, a sound like a resting leviathan. For Elias, I imagine it was the dead, echoing silence of a phone call ending.
Two weeks after that call, Apex Tech booked the largest keynote hall at the San Francisco convention center for what was billed as a "paradigm-defining product announcement." The entire tech world was holding its breath. They knew a king had fallen; they were waiting to see who would be crowned in his place.
I stood backstage, in the cool, artificially lit space behind a massive screen that currently displayed the Apex l
