Strap on your party hats and cut a slice of birthday cake with us: Switch turned fifteen this morning! (If you don’t have party hats or a slice of birthday cake, please go and get both as soon as possible).

 
 
 
 
 
 
Okay, now that our editor is confused with cake, here’s a list of things we can (legally!) do now that we’re fifteen:

1. Ride a moped! (in Australia)
2. Get a driver’s license (in some states in the US)!
3. Play paintball (who’s been with us long enough to remember the paintball game? We can do that legally now!)
4. Get a part-time job! (someone needs to keep the office in chocolate and sugar).
5. Go on an epic quest to save our country from a feudal landlord by collecting the five Infinity Stones of—Wait, sorry, wrong story.
6. Watch movies rated 15+ – who’s ready for a sleepover?

Turning 15

Turning fifteen as a company is a milestone. It’s estimated that the average company lifespan is rapidly shrinking, down from around 67 years in the 1920s to just 15 today; by 2027, the average company is only going to survive 12 years, if that, and nobody knows what the future beyond that will bring.
Switch is like an ecosystem. Every person inside it contributes a function that is indescribably different to everyone else’s. We adapt, and we change; we think about everything we’ve been through before we do something new.
We look towards the future, but at the same time, our past is a reminder, from Rik’s mementos of ICOM meetings past to pictures of events we’ve loved and look forward to again. Today, there’s 15 years of those past moments that have chartered out a constellation to where we are now.
We’re 15 years old, and that doesn’t come lightly. More importantly, we’re fifteen years more experienced now, and if you look back and see that something has changed, it’s this: we adapt, and we grow, and we hope to seek an endlessly better opportunity, a more interesting job, a better understanding of a digital world that we’re only on the cusp of understanding.
Stuff is changing around the office; our processes are changing; we’re growing, as a company and as individuals. We’re constantly, continuously, seeking better in ourselves, our work, our lives.

Looking Forward

Here’s everything we’re hoping to do in 15 years.

1. Start typing on virtual, laser-projected keyboards.
2. Hold our CEO Rik to his promise of a six-day weekend.
3. See an Mriehel parking lot finished in our lifetime.
4. Transition completely to communicating via neural networks.
5. Invent a new colour that blends together the green of Buskett in April, the grey of summer rain, and the blue of our copywriter’s beetle car. We’ll call it Grenbly, and it shall be marketed to everyone except Anish Kapoor.
6. Invent the world’s first cake that tastes like Fontanella chocolate cake, has no calories, and can replace all three of your mealtimes.
7. Move to a Maltese villa and encourage rumours of hauntings by intermittently setting up a weekend choir to sing eerie nursery rhymes in C minor.
8. Fill Luke’s desk strategically with a collection of items in the image of his dire enemy, the panda.
9. Adopt Every Dog Possible and become a completely nomadic entity propelled forward by Man’s Best Friend, and Pablo.

10. Convince Matt to attend a social function without his phone.
11. Poke awake the eldritch being sleeping under Mriehel and bargain someone’s soul away for the chance to have a lifetime supply of crisps. We suspect it will be the copywriter, who does not like crisps and prefers cats to dogs.
12. Reboot F.R.I.E.N.D.S with Thomas acting out all of the roles, in different voices, costumes, and perceptions of reality.
13. Revert back to writing entirely in hieroglyphics to prepare us for the stage where pictographs will take over written language and the world will communicate solely trough emojis.
14. Convince Ernesta to adopt her dire enemy, the sphynx cat.
15. Access the secret of immortality, but in doing so resign ourselves to documenting humanity’s fascination with creating arbitrary laws to govern arbitrary laws about arbitrary laws.

However, these might take a lot longer to put into place than current reality permits, so if you’re interested in what we’re looking forward to in the next fifteen years in this timeline, Rik is writing about it  – stay tuned!