The best and worst of times, inventions, decisions and personalities
We look back at a decade in tech
By Danny Bradbury
February 25, 2011
February 25, 2011
It started with a bang, thanks to the dot-com bomb, and ended with a gentle trickling sound, as Wikileaks spilled thousands of secret cables onto the Internet. The “noughties” have been a wild ride for technology. Here are some of the best and the worst events, products and people from this memorable decade.
BEST market disruptors
iTunes. Apple’s iTunes has consistently chipped away at CD sales over the past decade, while chaotic file-sharing sites came and went. The iTunes store has evolved over time to encompass movies, TV and now books, and Apple’s use of the iPod as a media consumption device complemented it perfectly. Apple’s music ecosystem presided over a shift that saw digital music sales rise 940 per cent between 2004 and 2009, even as total market revenues dropped by 30 per cent. iTunes gets the nod as the decade’s biggest disruptive technology.
Kindle. If there’s one industry even more conservative than music, it’s book publishing. E-books have been available for a decade, but it took the might of Amazon to push the format into the mainstream. Other platforms and devices have followed in the wake of the Kindle, but it is clearly Amazon that is setting the pace.
Skype. From a standing start in 2003, Skype has opened up the phone business. It is not as reliable as conventional wired systems, but for an increasing number of users Skype is good enough. Skype calls comprised 13 per cent of the world’s call minutes in 2009, according to TeleGeography Research. If that isn’t a wake-up call for operators, we don’t know what is.
WORST blights on computing
Botnets. Botnets have affected millions of PC users around the world for a decade. Malware infects your PC and then opens it up to the control of a “bot herder,” turning it into anything from a spam source to a child porn server. More recently, botnets have been used to steal users’ passwords, impersonate their online banking sessions and even mount hacking attacks on Web sites. We hate them and we wish they’d go away. But they won’t.
Facebook. Facebook is both one of the best and worst inventions of the noughties. It’s wonderful for organizing your social life, but from a business perspective it’s poison. How much productivity is lost by people goofing off and virtually poking each other at work? Young Mr. Zuckerberg has a lot to answer for.
Email. It isn’t just spam that has turned e-mail into a monster, but also “grey” mail: unwanted newsletters and circulars that clog our inboxes. Then there are the countless CC’ed e-mail conversations that we really don’t need to see, the unreasonable expectations of clients wanting instant answers and, of course, the interpersonal damage when someone misreads the tone of an e-mail and takes umbrage.
Google tried to offer an alternative to e-mail in the form of Google Wave in 2009, but people just didn’t get it. Unfortunately, e-mail is a hard habit to kick, and it looks set to keep us spinning our wheels for some time to come.
BEST industry figures
Steve Jobs. In 2000, three years after Steve Jobs took over as CEO, Apple’s stock price stood at around $28. Today, it’s at around $320. The NASDAQ has fallen by a third since January 2000 as Apple’s stock has risen 1,155 per cent. Jobs redefined the music market, launched a phone that gained three per cent share of a huge, competitive market in four years, reclaimed its position as an innovator in hardware design, and grew annual profits from a net loss all the way to $14 billion. Oh, and let’s not forget that market capitalization, which just hit $300 billion, placing it second only to Exxon Mobil.
Mark Zuckerberg. Hero or villain? On one hand, the founder of Facebook has shown a marked disrespect for privacy, launching (and being forced to revoke) services like Beacon, which broadcast users’ activity to other companies. And let’s not forget the infamous instant messages, in which he referred to his users as “dumb f*cks” for trusting him. On the other hand, Time named him person of the year. We’re going to label him a hero because he founded a company now valued at $50 billion when he wasn’t yet old enough to drink.
Jimmy Wales. Former futures trader Jimmy Wales co-founded Wikipedia in 2001. A decade later the site, which still refuses to take advertising, has become one of the most visited destinations on the Web. It defined the concept of crowdsourcing, and has served as a valuable source of information for millions. Wales was able to pursue this project as his passion after making enough money on the financial markets to support himself for life.
WORST damp squibs
Tablet computers. Apple succeeded in defining a new market category with the iPad and tablets were all the rage at CES 2011, but all of this happened only after Microsoft failed to make waves with its own tablet platform in 2002. Instead of designing a sleek device running a scaled-down and peppy operating system, it stuck with Windows XP. Instead of touch-screen displays, its hardware specifications embedded a bulky transparent Wacom tablet under the display and required people to use a stylus. Subsequent attempts to revolutionize the mobile PC platform also fell flat. The Web site (http://ow.ly/3EmiP) for its dead-in-the-water ultra-mobile touch-enabled PC project, codenamed Origami, still says it will be launched in 2008.
The Segway. The Segway was able to go 15 miles on a single six-hour charge, and was supposed to be untippable, thanks to a complex matrix of gyroscopes and computers that monitored what the machine was doing about 100 times a second. However, it didn’t stop then-president George Bush from famously falling off one.
Bolting an electric motor to a fancy broom handle was never going to change the way cities were built, as inventor Dean Kamen claimed at the time. It won’t do much for North America’s obesity problem either. Just get off and walk, already.
The SPOT watch. Smart Personal Object Technology (SPOT) was Microsoft‘s attempt to establish a wireless digital communications framework. Everything from coffee makers to alarm clocks would have used it, but the most talked-about application was for wristwatches. SPOT watches received news, weather and stock market information over a Microsoft-sponsored sub-carrier FM radio network called DirectBand. Users could also tune in other information channels provided by MSN Direct.
And no one bought SPOT devices. Were the watches too chunky? Did Wi-Fi kill DirectBand? Or perhaps people preferred to just look out of the window to check the weather. SPOT watches stopped selling in 2008 and DirectBand will stop broadcasting on Jan. 1, 2012.
BEST innovators
Google. Barely born in 2000, Google is now worth almost $200 billion. It redefined the Internet business model entirely by concentrating purely on advertising revenues, which drov e it to offer as many services as it possibly could for free. Key innovations have included online office applications that deeply worried Microsoft, mapping applications that continue to evolve, augmented reality visual search (in the form of Google Goggles), and even development software that will allow people to monitor energy usage in their homes.
The firm engineered this innovation by asking employees to spend one fifth of their time on pet projects. That enabled, for example, a single Google engineer to develop Google News. He simply wanted to scan headlines from multiple sites and compare stories.
Perhaps that explains the lack of major shock when Google revealed it had sent driverless cars around 140,000 miles of U.S. roads. The proof-of-concept test included a real person who could take control at any time and was designed to “help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use,” in Google’s words. We can’t wait to see what Google does next.
Apple. In 1997, newly reinstated CEO Steve Jobs publicly thanked Bill Gates for investing $150 million in the company that his predecessors beached. Fourteen years on, Apple’s market cap and quarterly revenues both exceed Microsoft’s by 25 per cent. Jobs rationalized the product base and reintroduced his razor-sharp focus on design, making Apple sexy again. But he also thrust into new markets so successfully that he was able to drop “Computer” from Apple’s name. Music-related products and services now total a fifth of net sales, just 10 years after the iPod launched. It’s an astonishing comeback.
Cisco. Some companies innovate in terms of product, while others innovate in terms of structure and process. Take Cisco, which spent 20 years building its core router and networking business before suddenly deciding that it needed to expand.
Under the leadership of powerhouse CEO John Chambers, it has established itself in everything from voice over IP and videoconferencing through to online collaboration, energy efficient building management and electrical smart grids. It is even putting the Internet into space by embedding routers in satellites.
Chambers established a unique management structure, flattening the traditional hierarchy and making different parts of the company agile enough to push into 30 new markets in the pursuit of even greater growth. Innovation, indeed.
WORST business decisions
Suing Novell and IBM (Darl McBride). When you can’t innovative, sue.
Software company SCO had been working on a standard version of Linux to challenge Microsoft Windows, but new CEO Darl McBride changed tack, launching lawsuits against Novell, IBM and several corporate Linux users shortly after taking the helm. He alleged that IBM and Novell had used the source code for Unix (which SCO had bought from Novell) in their own products. Novell subsequently claimed that it hadn’t even sold the copyrights to SCO. SCO repeatedly lost its claims in court, and eventually filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.
McBride was terminated in October 2009 after being hailed as the most hated man in the industry. SCO, which has been trying to sell its Unix assets and which has had its stock relegated to the pink sheets, is now appealing the Novell decision, again. What a sorry story.
Going it alone (Carly Fiorina). Everything looked so good for Carly Fiorina, who joined HP in 1999. The first outsider to take the helm, she quickly pulled 80 business units into four divisions and then engineered a mega-merger with Compaq that caused a huge rift in the company, but succeeded nonetheless.
But Fiorina proved too divisive a figure. She refused to hire a COO (a position that even Steve Jobs accommodates) and she fired many potential lieutenants in HP. As the company began to drastically underperform, she refused to change tack, forcing her fellow directors to engineer a boardroom coup. Fiorina, who didn’t land another tech CEO position, epitomized John Donne’s most famous quote: “No [wo]man is an island, entire of itself.”
Turning down the Microsoft deal (Jerry Yang). To be fair, it was the entire board of Yahoo! that turned down a takeover offer by Microsoft in February 2008, but its CEO will always wear the decision. Microsoft’s bid priced Yahoo! at $31 per share, a 62 per cent premium on the stock’s value at the time, which languished at a four-year low. “The Board believes that Microsoft’s proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo!,” the firm said when it rejected the offer.
Microsoft pulled the plug, and Yahoo! saw its share price plummet over the next three years. At the time of writing, it was trading at just shy of US$17, 20 per cent down on its price at the time. Yahoo! has consistently trailed the NASDAQ index since mid-2008. Yang left in 2009.
SCO took a beating after its litigious spat with various industry players began.
BEST computing innovation
Open computing. Open computing may have begun with standard network protocols but the idea didn’t really reach the application layer until the last decade. It was one of the main pillars of Web 2.0 and we couldn’t have created most of the services we enjoy now without it.
Vendor-independent technologies like the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and REST (Representational State Transfer) took off in the early noughties, enabling software applications and Web 2.0 services to talk directly to each other more easily. That’s why you can now mash up Google Maps with Twitter, LinkedIn and Flickr data.
Virtualization. Virtualization has actually been around since the 1960s and IBM’s mainframe platforms, but it really came into its own over the last decade as companies began to consolidate their server infrastructures. Virtualization has been one of the primary mechanisms for greening the data centre in the past few years: companies have used it to increase average CPU usage from 15 per cent to around 90 per cent, fitting more operating systems onto a single machine and drastically reducing the number of physical computers needed in the computing room. Virtualization has also been one of the foundational technologies behind cloud computing, which we will see coming into its own over the next five years.
Social networking and crowdsourcing. Social networking filled a gap in the Internet: the ability to connect with each other socially and intuitively, and in doing so it changed the nature of relationships. Often decried by non-users, the reality is that most people can only regularly touch base with a handful of people, and social media addresses that.
Now, pundits such as tech publishing mogul Tim O’Reilly talk about a global consciousness emerging from social networking and crowdsourcing, as the people involved in contributing to the whole make it continually smarter—and become smarter themselves. We’re lumping social networking and crowdsourcing together because they’re already overlapping, and we’re pretty sure that over the next decade they will intersect even more closely.
Also in this issue: Ten years in the tech world. The more things change...
BEST market disruptors
iTunes. Apple’s iTunes has consistently chipped away at CD sales over the past decade, while chaotic file-sharing sites came and went. The iTunes store has evolved over time to encompass movies, TV and now books, and Apple’s use of the iPod as a media consumption device complemented it perfectly. Apple’s music ecosystem presided over a shift that saw digital music sales rise 940 per cent between 2004 and 2009, even as total market revenues dropped by 30 per cent. iTunes gets the nod as the decade’s biggest disruptive technology.
Kindle. If there’s one industry even more conservative than music, it’s book publishing. E-books have been available for a decade, but it took the might of Amazon to push the format into the mainstream. Other platforms and devices have followed in the wake of the Kindle, but it is clearly Amazon that is setting the pace.
Skype. From a standing start in 2003, Skype has opened up the phone business. It is not as reliable as conventional wired systems, but for an increasing number of users Skype is good enough. Skype calls comprised 13 per cent of the world’s call minutes in 2009, according to TeleGeography Research. If that isn’t a wake-up call for operators, we don’t know what is.
WORST blights on computing
Botnets. Botnets have affected millions of PC users around the world for a decade. Malware infects your PC and then opens it up to the control of a “bot herder,” turning it into anything from a spam source to a child porn server. More recently, botnets have been used to steal users’ passwords, impersonate their online banking sessions and even mount hacking attacks on Web sites. We hate them and we wish they’d go away. But they won’t.
Facebook. Facebook is both one of the best and worst inventions of the noughties. It’s wonderful for organizing your social life, but from a business perspective it’s poison. How much productivity is lost by people goofing off and virtually poking each other at work? Young Mr. Zuckerberg has a lot to answer for.
Email. It isn’t just spam that has turned e-mail into a monster, but also “grey” mail: unwanted newsletters and circulars that clog our inboxes. Then there are the countless CC’ed e-mail conversations that we really don’t need to see, the unreasonable expectations of clients wanting instant answers and, of course, the interpersonal damage when someone misreads the tone of an e-mail and takes umbrage.
Google tried to offer an alternative to e-mail in the form of Google Wave in 2009, but people just didn’t get it. Unfortunately, e-mail is a hard habit to kick, and it looks set to keep us spinning our wheels for some time to come.
BEST industry figures
Steve Jobs. In 2000, three years after Steve Jobs took over as CEO, Apple’s stock price stood at around $28. Today, it’s at around $320. The NASDAQ has fallen by a third since January 2000 as Apple’s stock has risen 1,155 per cent. Jobs redefined the music market, launched a phone that gained three per cent share of a huge, competitive market in four years, reclaimed its position as an innovator in hardware design, and grew annual profits from a net loss all the way to $14 billion. Oh, and let’s not forget that market capitalization, which just hit $300 billion, placing it second only to Exxon Mobil.
Mark Zuckerberg. Hero or villain? On one hand, the founder of Facebook has shown a marked disrespect for privacy, launching (and being forced to revoke) services like Beacon, which broadcast users’ activity to other companies. And let’s not forget the infamous instant messages, in which he referred to his users as “dumb f*cks” for trusting him. On the other hand, Time named him person of the year. We’re going to label him a hero because he founded a company now valued at $50 billion when he wasn’t yet old enough to drink.
Jimmy Wales. Former futures trader Jimmy Wales co-founded Wikipedia in 2001. A decade later the site, which still refuses to take advertising, has become one of the most visited destinations on the Web. It defined the concept of crowdsourcing, and has served as a valuable source of information for millions. Wales was able to pursue this project as his passion after making enough money on the financial markets to support himself for life.
WORST damp squibs
Tablet computers. Apple succeeded in defining a new market category with the iPad and tablets were all the rage at CES 2011, but all of this happened only after Microsoft failed to make waves with its own tablet platform in 2002. Instead of designing a sleek device running a scaled-down and peppy operating system, it stuck with Windows XP. Instead of touch-screen displays, its hardware specifications embedded a bulky transparent Wacom tablet under the display and required people to use a stylus. Subsequent attempts to revolutionize the mobile PC platform also fell flat. The Web site (http://ow.ly/3EmiP) for its dead-in-the-water ultra-mobile touch-enabled PC project, codenamed Origami, still says it will be launched in 2008.
The Segway. The Segway was able to go 15 miles on a single six-hour charge, and was supposed to be untippable, thanks to a complex matrix of gyroscopes and computers that monitored what the machine was doing about 100 times a second. However, it didn’t stop then-president George Bush from famously falling off one.
Bolting an electric motor to a fancy broom handle was never going to change the way cities were built, as inventor Dean Kamen claimed at the time. It won’t do much for North America’s obesity problem either. Just get off and walk, already.
The SPOT watch. Smart Personal Object Technology (SPOT) was Microsoft‘s attempt to establish a wireless digital communications framework. Everything from coffee makers to alarm clocks would have used it, but the most talked-about application was for wristwatches. SPOT watches received news, weather and stock market information over a Microsoft-sponsored sub-carrier FM radio network called DirectBand. Users could also tune in other information channels provided by MSN Direct.
And no one bought SPOT devices. Were the watches too chunky? Did Wi-Fi kill DirectBand? Or perhaps people preferred to just look out of the window to check the weather. SPOT watches stopped selling in 2008 and DirectBand will stop broadcasting on Jan. 1, 2012.
BEST innovators
Google. Barely born in 2000, Google is now worth almost $200 billion. It redefined the Internet business model entirely by concentrating purely on advertising revenues, which drov e it to offer as many services as it possibly could for free. Key innovations have included online office applications that deeply worried Microsoft, mapping applications that continue to evolve, augmented reality visual search (in the form of Google Goggles), and even development software that will allow people to monitor energy usage in their homes.
The firm engineered this innovation by asking employees to spend one fifth of their time on pet projects. That enabled, for example, a single Google engineer to develop Google News. He simply wanted to scan headlines from multiple sites and compare stories.
Perhaps that explains the lack of major shock when Google revealed it had sent driverless cars around 140,000 miles of U.S. roads. The proof-of-concept test included a real person who could take control at any time and was designed to “help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use,” in Google’s words. We can’t wait to see what Google does next.
Apple. In 1997, newly reinstated CEO Steve Jobs publicly thanked Bill Gates for investing $150 million in the company that his predecessors beached. Fourteen years on, Apple’s market cap and quarterly revenues both exceed Microsoft’s by 25 per cent. Jobs rationalized the product base and reintroduced his razor-sharp focus on design, making Apple sexy again. But he also thrust into new markets so successfully that he was able to drop “Computer” from Apple’s name. Music-related products and services now total a fifth of net sales, just 10 years after the iPod launched. It’s an astonishing comeback.
Cisco. Some companies innovate in terms of product, while others innovate in terms of structure and process. Take Cisco, which spent 20 years building its core router and networking business before suddenly deciding that it needed to expand.
Under the leadership of powerhouse CEO John Chambers, it has established itself in everything from voice over IP and videoconferencing through to online collaboration, energy efficient building management and electrical smart grids. It is even putting the Internet into space by embedding routers in satellites.
Chambers established a unique management structure, flattening the traditional hierarchy and making different parts of the company agile enough to push into 30 new markets in the pursuit of even greater growth. Innovation, indeed.
WORST business decisions
Suing Novell and IBM (Darl McBride). When you can’t innovative, sue.
Software company SCO had been working on a standard version of Linux to challenge Microsoft Windows, but new CEO Darl McBride changed tack, launching lawsuits against Novell, IBM and several corporate Linux users shortly after taking the helm. He alleged that IBM and Novell had used the source code for Unix (which SCO had bought from Novell) in their own products. Novell subsequently claimed that it hadn’t even sold the copyrights to SCO. SCO repeatedly lost its claims in court, and eventually filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.
McBride was terminated in October 2009 after being hailed as the most hated man in the industry. SCO, which has been trying to sell its Unix assets and which has had its stock relegated to the pink sheets, is now appealing the Novell decision, again. What a sorry story.
Going it alone (Carly Fiorina). Everything looked so good for Carly Fiorina, who joined HP in 1999. The first outsider to take the helm, she quickly pulled 80 business units into four divisions and then engineered a mega-merger with Compaq that caused a huge rift in the company, but succeeded nonetheless.
But Fiorina proved too divisive a figure. She refused to hire a COO (a position that even Steve Jobs accommodates) and she fired many potential lieutenants in HP. As the company began to drastically underperform, she refused to change tack, forcing her fellow directors to engineer a boardroom coup. Fiorina, who didn’t land another tech CEO position, epitomized John Donne’s most famous quote: “No [wo]man is an island, entire of itself.”
Turning down the Microsoft deal (Jerry Yang). To be fair, it was the entire board of Yahoo! that turned down a takeover offer by Microsoft in February 2008, but its CEO will always wear the decision. Microsoft’s bid priced Yahoo! at $31 per share, a 62 per cent premium on the stock’s value at the time, which languished at a four-year low. “The Board believes that Microsoft’s proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo!,” the firm said when it rejected the offer.
Microsoft pulled the plug, and Yahoo! saw its share price plummet over the next three years. At the time of writing, it was trading at just shy of US$17, 20 per cent down on its price at the time. Yahoo! has consistently trailed the NASDAQ index since mid-2008. Yang left in 2009.
SCO took a beating after its litigious spat with various industry players began.
BEST computing innovation
Open computing. Open computing may have begun with standard network protocols but the idea didn’t really reach the application layer until the last decade. It was one of the main pillars of Web 2.0 and we couldn’t have created most of the services we enjoy now without it.
Vendor-independent technologies like the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and REST (Representational State Transfer) took off in the early noughties, enabling software applications and Web 2.0 services to talk directly to each other more easily. That’s why you can now mash up Google Maps with Twitter, LinkedIn and Flickr data.
Virtualization. Virtualization has actually been around since the 1960s and IBM’s mainframe platforms, but it really came into its own over the last decade as companies began to consolidate their server infrastructures. Virtualization has been one of the primary mechanisms for greening the data centre in the past few years: companies have used it to increase average CPU usage from 15 per cent to around 90 per cent, fitting more operating systems onto a single machine and drastically reducing the number of physical computers needed in the computing room. Virtualization has also been one of the foundational technologies behind cloud computing, which we will see coming into its own over the next five years.
Social networking and crowdsourcing. Social networking filled a gap in the Internet: the ability to connect with each other socially and intuitively, and in doing so it changed the nature of relationships. Often decried by non-users, the reality is that most people can only regularly touch base with a handful of people, and social media addresses that.
Now, pundits such as tech publishing mogul Tim O’Reilly talk about a global consciousness emerging from social networking and crowdsourcing, as the people involved in contributing to the whole make it continually smarter—and become smarter themselves. We’re lumping social networking and crowdsourcing together because they’re already overlapping, and we’re pretty sure that over the next decade they will intersect even more closely.
Also in this issue: Ten years in the tech world. The more things change...
