Decade in Review: the 25 Most Important Tech Moments of 2000 - 2010

Posted 12/28/2010 at 2:29pm | by Loyd Case

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19. Wireless

I’m talking about wireless in the general sense, as in not needing wires. Whether it’s Wi-Fi or mobile broadband or Bluetooth or the emerging 60GHz frequency stuff, wireless technologies is already shaping up to be to the next decade what wide broadband availability was to the previous one. Coupled with smartphones and mobile PC technologies, wireless will enable us to be more connected than ever – for good or ill.

18. Media Electronica

Slowly, but surely, all media is becoming digital. The obvious forms, of course, are music and video. Movies are also increasingly becoming digital, though many are still shot on film.

Perhaps the most dramatic transformation, though, is how fast books are going digital. Google’s initiative to digitize every book ever written and ebook readers like the Kindle series from Amazon, are rapidly changing the way we read books, how they’re distributed, and how writers and publishers are paid. To be honest, we’re surprised at how fast this is happening.

Purely digital forms of art and media are cropping up too, ranging from electronic games to machinima. Even the creation of music is moving towards a purely digital incarnation. Query: In the coming decade, will we see an art masterpiece, created digitally and distributed digitally, that sells for millions of dollars?

17. Digital Distribution

Since all media is going digital, it’s natural that we’re simultaneously witnessing digital distribution become the norm. Since digital distribution is so disruptive, it’s no surprise that technology-focused companies have grabbed the leadership role in this evolution, and not media companies.

Apple’s iTunes is the big kahuna for music distribution, though Amazon is gaining traction as Zune fades into the background. Steam seems to be the leader in digital distribution of PC games, but Impules, Direct2Drive and GamersGate nipping at Valve’s heels. Netflix began as a company renting DVDs by mail, but has become the movie and TV show streaming king. The big game console companies offer online distribution of indie and some tier one titles. And this doesn’t even take into account the advent of streaming services such as Pandora, Last.fm, or Rdio.

Whether you read, listen, watch or play, it’s a sure bet that some part of that will be distributed digitally.

16. Green Energy

The Chevy Volt won Motor Trend’s Car of the Year Award. That, in itself, says much about how green power has captured the imagination of businesses and individuals.

While most power generation is still derived from fossil fuels, we’re starting to see greater emphasis on alternative power sources. Solar power seems to be getting most of the attention, whether its mega-generation facilities built in the Mojave desert or increasing numbers of consumers installing panels on their homes. Even so, other interesting alternatives are seeing the light of day, including tidal power generation and more wind farms.

Cars like the Prius have paved the way for automobiles with a stronger focus on plug-in capability, including the Volt, Nissan Leaf and Tesla Motors. The next decade will be a seminal one for alternative power.

15. iPhone

Contrary to popular thinking, smartphones existed before Apple shipped its first iPhone in 2007. Microsoft’s Pocket PC OS, which eventually morphed into Windows Mobile, existed in a number of different smartphones. Almost all were clunky and had user interface issues. RIM had been shipping Blackberry phones for years before the iPhone, and had its own dedicated following of “Crackberry” devotees, but the Blackberry was really focused on corporate email and scheduling, and lacked a wider audience.

The iPhone not only made smartphones sexy, but the app store opened up a huge new business for smartphone applications. Other smartphone makers have tried to emulate that with limited success – though Android seems to be gaining significant traction.

14. The Cloud & the Return of Big Iron

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, mainframe computers were the mainstay of computing, through minicomputers providing departmental access to computer resources. As the PC moved to the forefront, the era of big iron seemed to be over. But trends tend to spiral back, rather than move in simple straight lines, and now large scale servers are back in fashion.

Big iron is back, albeit in a different form than the mainframes of past eras. The reason is the increasing use of “The Cloud” – storage and compute resources that exist on the Internet, rather than locally on your PC. The cloud has major benefits, the biggest being easy access to data from any platform or location. Now we’re starting to see interesting experiments like OnLive, which is trying to deliver a robust gaming experience from the cloud using very limited hardware on the client end.

Valid concerns exist regarding data and apps on the cloud. If Google goes down, all your Google Docs are inaccessible. But the cloud is here to stay, and will likely shape how we use computing resources in the future.

13. Android & the Rise of Google

Google was once just a search engine, generating revenue with an advertising-oriented model. As the company amassed a gargantuan warchest from the vast amount of ad dollars the company collected, it began branching out. Some of these experiments proved highly successful, like Chrome and Gmail. Others were failures, like Google Wave. Honestly, even the failures were interesting.

It’s looking like Google’s biggest success after search will be Android. Taken as a whole, this open-source mobile operating system has surpassed Apple as the biggest smartphone OS, though iPhones sell better than any single Android Phone. Android is shaping up to be the Windows of the phone world, while iOS is, well, the Apple of the phone world.

12. PCs become commodities and the death of chipsets

We love our PCs. We build all our own desktops, and tend to mod laptops with larger amounts of storage and RAM. Even so, we know in our hearts that the PC is really just another commodity. When one of the primary selling aspects of many laptops is their appearance, we’ve moved beyond PCs being technological icons.

As PCs have become increasingly commoditized, only a few large companies can really stay in the PC business. At the start of the decade, we saw a half-dozen companies developing and selling core logic. Now we have Intel building chipsets for Intel platforms and AMD creating them for AMD platforms. Nvidia is out of the desktop chipset business, and its mobile chipsets are pretty much restricted to Ion. Via is only doing chipsets for its own Centaur-designed CPUs and SiS seems to have given up, at least in North America and Europe.

As CPU manufacturing processes have shrunk, more core logic functionality is being built onto the CPU. All modern CPUs now have on-die memory controllers, and soon on-die graphics will be mainstream. Only I/O functionality, which changes rapidly, will remain. The net result: lower costs for PC components and even more commoditization.

So while PCs are still essential, they’re now just part of the larger technology ecosystem that’s part of our digital lives. It’s easy to speculate that devices like smartphones and tablets may take over that spot in the next decade.

11. Windows 7

I mention Windows 7 not so much because it’s a great desktop OS. It is. In fact, you could make a case that Windows 7 is really the OS that Vista should have been.

But Windows 7 also represents a renewed and reinvigorated Microsoft. After Vista, the company was shamefully perceived as a technological also-ran, a dinosaur doomed to eventually fade into irrelevance. Now, Microsoft is looked upon as an underdog. From monolith to irrelevance to underdog in 10 years is a monumental seachange, and even though companies like Google and Apple still get more attention, Microsoft appears to be embracing its underdog role.
Additionally, Windows 7 Mobile looks to be a bigger success than its detractors predicted, though it’s still not in the same category as Android or iOS.

The real question is how corporate and technological leadership will shape up at Microsoft in the post-Bill Gates era. If Microsoft has more Steve Sinofskys waiting in the wings, the company will be in good shape.