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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10. Connected CE Devices

Most of the Maximum PC crew use Netflix Watch Instantly to stream movies and older TV shows to our HDTVs. Most of us do not use PCs for this. Some of us use game consoles, but several use Blu-ray players and TVs that are connected to the Internet with Netflix built-in.

We’re seeing more and more of these web-connected consumer electronics devices arriving on the market. You can control a Dish ViP-722k satellite DVR with an iPad via the 722k’s web connection. You can now do the same with Comcast’s newest cable boxes. An increasing number of flat panel TVs offer apps, widgets and simple web connectivity. It’s a gated experience, to be sure, with limitations. But being able to use a Blu-ray player, which only uses 18W when turned on, instead of a PC or Xbox 360, also saves power.

Of course, that opens up the possibility of really weird device connections, like IP enabled toasters. Overall, it’s a good trend. Our only real worry is security. Already, security issues have been uncovered with some HP web-connected printers. Will my refrigerator someday become part of an illegal botnet, without my knowledge? The crystal ball is cloudy.

9. Digital TV

If you read some commentators a few years ago, the changeover to digital television was shaping up to be a consumer electronics apocalypse. Viewers everywhere would go into fits of rage when their analog TVs never worked.

**Yawn**

As it turned out, the DTV transition, though delayed a few months, went smoother than anyone anticipated. Part of the reason was the legwork that all the broadcast stations had done, making sure all their broadcasts were digitally enabled. In addition, many people already subscribed to cable or satellite, which had already transitioned to digital in their set-top boxes. The sexiness of flat panel TVs has had a big impact, since all flat panel HDTVs are digital in nature.

8. Consoles Take Gaming Multiplatfom

At the start of the 2000s, PCs were pretty much the bleeding edge of gaming. Sure, console gaming was a big deal, but all the nifty new games that took advantage of new graphics features and pushed the state of the art when it came to raw technology ran on PCs. This culminated with the 2007 release of Crysis, a PC game that still hammers high end gaming systems.

Now, though, it’s a multiplatform world. New, innovative, and absorbing games are first targeted at one of the big three consoles. For a few years, it looked like PCs had become completely irrelevant for mainstream gaming, unless you were an MMO addict.

The pendulum has swung back a bit. For one thing, the console hardware cycle has lengthened, so we’re not seeing a new console every five years. Instead, the companies are iterating, with additions to existing platforms, like Microsoft’s recent Kinect add-on for the Xbox 360.

Game companies now maintain dedicated PC teams for large-scale titles, which work alongside console dev teams to make a PC version of a multiplatform game feel like a true PC title, and not a cheap port. Cool new indie games and digital distribution has helped, too.

We’re unlikely to ever see many AAA titles which are PC exclusive ship, though there are exceptions like Starcraft II. For the most part, it’s now a multiplatform gaming world, but what that means is that PC gamers mostly won’t feel left out. (Though I’m still looking for that PC port of Drake’s Fortune.)

7. The eternal battle: AMD versus Intel

AMD has proven more resilient than anyone expected, although its current CPU line is no longer competitive at the high end – or really, even the midrange. Still, the company is doing some really neat stuff, like its current effort to build DirectX 11 programmable graphics into the CPU die with its Fusion effort. Buying ATI Graphics seemed like a dubious move at the time, but it’s paid off in spades, giving AMD renewed energy. Dumping fabs seemed to have also helped.

In the early part of the decade, Intel appeared moribund. Netburst looked like a dead end, and the dual core versions of Netburst – the Pentium D – could have doubled as miniature space heaters. The Prescott generation was supposed to fix all that – but proved to be just as hot. Netburst had hit a wall, and future projects were cancelled. Intel put all its efforts behind an architecture originally developed for mobile PCs by its Israeli design team, known simply as Core. Eventually, Intel delivered the CPU internally called Conroe. The result was the fastest turnaround in a large technology company we’ve ever seen.

The Core 2 line, and its later iterations, reshaped the desktop PC. While AMD had been pushing the IPC efficiency mantra for several years, the Core 2 line legitimized that approach. Now Intel is all about performance per watt, and subsequent generations have improved performance without pushing up power draw. This effort allowed Intel to also push down into lower power CPUs, like Atom. Once again, a company that seemed like it was slowly being relegated to the backwater of tech companies that couldn’t keep up was again in the forefront.

6. The CPU Wars: AMD (ATI) Versus Nvidia

The battle for the heart and soul of graphics processing has been a back-and-forth between AMD (formerly ATI) and Nvidia for years. On the surface, it’s always looked like an uneven fight, with Nvidia’s rapid growth giving it vastly more resources than AMD’s graphics group, including some of the leading graphics architects.

AMD had some of its own cards, including the architecture team brought over after its acquisition of ArtX, which designed the GPU for Nintendo 64. AMDs graphics chips have been reflections of the company that built them – lean, spare designs that made the most of the resources available and were power efficient. AMD GPUs sometimes even briefly captured the raw performance crown for brief periods, as it did with the original Radeon 9700 and the more recent Radeon HD 5870.

On the other hand, you won’t find a more competitive corporate culture than Nvidia, and its GPU division has constantly come back with interesting, but brute-force designs, though they’ve only recently embraced the performance per watt mantra. They’ve held the raw performance crown more often than not, but have stumbled in other areas on occasion, as its issues with mobile GPUs in 2008 demonstrated.

It’s always been an interesting battle to watch, but as the Internet and even desktop apps become more visual, or more able to take advantage of parallel GPU compute resources, it’s also going to have a bigger impact going forward.

5. The Death of High Fidelity

Many of us have 5.1 or 7.1 channel audio systems in our TV rooms. We embrace high fidelity audio at Maximum PC, but we’re beginning to feel like this is becoming more of a rarity.

The iPod and related MP3 players, have pretty much killed high fidelity. Highly compressed audio is the norm, and some studies have shown that the new generation of music listeners actually prefer the sound of compressed music to uncompressed audio streams. That should be no surprise – you like what you hear most often.

Recently, an Audio Advisor catalog, which focuses on audiophile gear, arrived in the mail. We were amazed at just how many products were really pricey DACs and tube-based iPod docks that purported to make compressed audio streams sound better. Sigh—Hi-Fi is truly dead.

We do hold out some minimal hope, mostly because of Blu-ray. We’ve recently seen Blu-ray concert discs that use uncompressed PCM audio for 7.1 channel playback. It’s hard to see this ever becoming mainstream, however.

4. The GPU Achieves Parity

The CPU was the heart of the PC. If had been up to Intel, that would have been the case forever and ever. Almost single-handedly due to Nvidia’s efforts initially, with AMD stepping up in a supporting role more recently, the GPU is finally becoming appreciated at an equal partner inside the PC. Don’t believe me? Consider Intel’s new Sandy Bridge CPU, coming out early in 2011. Intel has been busy touting how effective its dedicated video block is for decoding and encoding video – without even touching the CPU cores. Sure, video is just a baby step, but it’s a pretty big concession from the Guys in Blue.

It helps, I suppose, that Intel and AMD are integrating GPU functionality into CPU cores. But really, it’s the applications that are proving the point. Whether high end apps, like Premiere Pro CS5 or math packages like Mathematica 8, GPU computing is gaining traction.

3. Space Exploration goes Private

As pressure has increased on the NASA budget, private companies have formed to build rockets, with the eventual goal of making near-earth orbit space travel a mainstream mainstay in a few decades. While a lot of attention has been focused on Virgin Galactic, whose design efforts are headed by Burt Rutan, most of the successful efforts have involved using existing launch vehicles to deliver commercial payloads into orbit.

The next decade should see increased activity, as these companies ramp up to deliver on promises of human travel into near-earth orbit. Who knows, maybe for the price of a typical luxury cruise, you’ll be able to pay a visit to an orbiting hotel before the next decade is out.

2. The Internet Bubble

We can’t really talk about the last decade in tech without acknowedging the Internet bubble of 2000-2001. Large numbers of startups crashed and burned as hugely overvalued companies discovered that investors really do care about making profits. We’ll have a moment of silence for companies like Webvan and Pets.com.

Was it a case of too much, too soon? If you look at some of the companies that sputtered out during the Internet bubble, you’ll find similar companies doing business in similar spaces today. What you won’t find is ridiculously overpriced valuations without business models that are geared towards making money.

Except for Twitter, of course.

1. The Fight for the Internet’s Soul

We’ll close with this last one which should give us all food for thought. As we write this, Apple has just announced its pulling the Wikileaks app from the iTunes App Store. Amazon’s hosting arm showed Wikileaks the door. And you can’t send money to Wikileaks via Bank of America or Paypal.

The Wikileaks saga is just one highly visible element in an ongoing battle for the heart and soul of the Internet. The Internet started out as a government-funded research project geared towards helping researchers more effectively communicate.

Since the advent of the Web – initially driven by Tim Berners-Lee, himself a researcher, the Internet has mushroomed into a gigantic hodgepodge of information wells and connected communities. It’s also become fertile ground for corporations, new and old, looking at the Internet as a vehicle for making money. We have no problems with making money on the web. But we do have problems when making money takes precedent over the free flow of information that was the hallmark of the early web.

This will only get worse as more governments get more involved. Given the huge array of different governments, conflicting laws and wide range of world views, there’s a real fear that we’ll get an Internet built on the least common denominator effect – a passive medium available for only the most vanilla, least threatening and least offensive information flows, all metered, regulated and paid for in microtransactions for each bit of data that flows.

The real battle in that arena has only just begun. And it won’t be won by hackers launching cyberattacks on commercial and government websites and servers, that’s for sure. It will only be won if each and every one of us who all have a vested interest in unfettered information access make our voices heard to all our governments and corporate entities.

This is just the beginning. Make yourself heard.