2010 has been a year of disruptive technologies

In January, shortly afterwards Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the device, I wrote that I was "underwhelmed" and argued that the new device was "not a game changer." Boy was I wrong. The iPad has been an incredible success and a major game changer.

Wherever I go I see people using iPads where they might have if not been using a laptop, reading a Kindle or just staring off in space. And it's not an important product just for Apple. It's spawning an utterly new category of computing devices. So far, no one has been able to come up with anything close to an iPad killer, nevertheless a few companies -- including Samsung -- are trying. Google is poised to introduce a tablet version of its Android operating system that will attempt to give the iPad the serious competition that Android phones have inflicted on the iPhone.

Chrome is part of Google's strategy to encourage cloud computing and Web-based apps or rather than relying on a traditional computer operating system like Windows and Macintosh. Though Chrome machines are very different from iPads, they both indicate that the era of traditional PCs may be winding down in favor of lighter, thinner and more energy-efficient devices that use the enormous power of the Internet to make up for a bit less horsepower on the device. Don't expect to see the PC disappear any time before long, however as Internet connectivity becomes more ubiquitous, we are starting to see devices that rely more on the power of the Internet, not just for connectivity yet for software and computing power as so then.

The PC front

Microsoft didn't make much news this year on the PC front, even though it did sell 240 million copies of Windows 7 since it was released in late 2009. The most exciting news from Microsoft was in gaming with the release of the Kinect controller for Xbox. Using motion sensors and both speech and face recognition, Kinect isn't just changing how people play games nevertheless also may in the end affect the way we interact with machines.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was a runner-up for Time's most important Person of the Year. Whether he's a hero or a villain is in the eye of the beholder. Now by facilitating the unauthorized publication of thousands of secret government documents, WikiLeaks has already had an enormous long-term impact the way the United States and most other governments conduct business going forward.

Ironically, WikiLeaks may be the crowning achievement of the U.S. Defense Department's original goal to create an Internet protected from centralized control. When the precursor to the Internet was created back in the 1960s, it was built as a decentralized network, in some cases, to keep the Soviets and other powers from being able to disrupt traffic by knocking out a central server.

While it's not clear if the U.S. would have the legal authority to knock WikiLeaks offline, it can't do that because Assange's supporters nevertheless have a redundant network of servers around the world to assure that the data remains available, regardless of what authorities try to do.

Disclosure: Larry Magid is co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a nonprofit Internet safety organization whose supporters include Facebook and Google. Contact Larry Magid at larry@larrymagid.com. Listen for his innovation chats on KCBS-AM weekdays at 3:50 p.m.