The 25 Most Important Tech Moments of 2000

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 then 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.

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 research-focused companies have grabbed the leadership role in this evolution, and not media companies.

The big kahuna for music distribution

Apple's iTunes is the big kahuna for music distribution, even though Amazon is gaining traction as Zune fades into the background. Steam seems to be the leader in digital distribution of PC games, however Impules, Direct2Drive and GamersGate nipping at Valve's heels. Netflix began as a company renting DVDs by mail, yet 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 just as Pandora, Last.fm, or Rdio.

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.

Contrary to popular thinking, smartphones existed earlier Apple shipped its first iPhone in 2007. Microsoft's Pocket PC OS, which in the end morphed into Windows Mobile, existed in a number of different smartphones. Nearly all were clunky and had user interface issues. RIM had been shipping Blackberry phones for years previously the iPhone, and had its own dedicated following of "Crackberry" devotees, now the Blackberry was in effect focused on corporate email and scheduling, and lacked a wider audience.

The iPhone not only made smartphones sexy

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

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. Nevertheless trends tend to spiral back, to put it more exactly than move in simple straight lines, and however 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, to put it more exactly than locally on your PC. The cloud has major benefits, the biggest being easy access to data from any platform or location. But 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. However the cloud is here to stay, and will likely shape how we use computing resources hereafter.

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 afterwards search will be Android. Taken in its entirety, this open-source mobile operating system has surpassed Apple as the biggest smartphone OS, although iPhones sell better than any single Android Phone. Android is shaping up to be the Windows of the phone world, during iOS is, then, the Apple of the phone world.

As PCs have become increasingly commoditized, only a few large companies can actually stay in the PC business. At the beginning of the decade, we saw a half-dozen companies developing and selling core logic. But 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, until further notice in North America and Europe.

So during PCs are all in all essential, they're but just part of the larger innovation 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 then decade.

Great desktop OS

I mention Windows 7 not so much because it's a great desktop OS. It is. As a matter of fact, you could make a case that Windows 7 is actually the OS that Vista should have been.

But Windows 7 as well represents a renewed and reinvigorated Microsoft. Afterwards Vista, the company was shamefully perceived as a technological as well-ran, a dinosaur doomed to in the end fade into irrelevance. Nevertheless, Microsoft is looked upon as an underdog. From monolith to irrelevance to underdog in 10 years is a monumental seachange, and although companies like Google and Apple after all 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, even though it's everything considered not in the same category as Android or iOS.

Sad that hi-fi is slowly dying. You would think that apple would allow you to download lossless audio from itunes. Even if it were their apple lossless codec I would probably start buying music online. As well sad the the ipod is but like gen 6 or 7 or something and all in all doesn't support FLAC. Not like the sound quality is good enough to bother playing FLACs back on an ipod anyways...

I as well would have liked to have seen Linux on there instead of Windows 7. Windows 7 in no real way revolutionized anything. Vista had a bigger hand in things than Windows 7, and XP played the biggest role. Nevertheless, look at how much Linux has grown. Even my mom knows what Linux is. Linux is here to stay at this stage, and will before long be a big competitor to Windows. As well, I didn't see anything for 64 bit processors, which was as well kind of a big deal.

It's shameful to list Windows 7 and not Windows XP, which all in all 10 years later remains the defacto dominant OS of the world. XP changed it all when it was the first OS with a real driver database baked right in. No more manually installing drivers every time someone wanted to plug in their $50, 128 MB flash drive. XP is so much more significant than 7 that 7 *even so* has a lot of core interface features and property dialogs cloned from XP.

The line product

Palm PDAs had app stores back when Apple's top of the line product was a G4. Sorry now the iphone isn't notable for anything.

I think this is the 3rd or 4th Maximum PC best of list of some type to include the iPhone as being mentioned. Between most significant steps of cell phones, the biggest tech milestones of the last decade, and the biggest blunders of the year; I'm beginning to think that the iPhone may be the most important technological achievement in the history of man kind. I feel honoured to live in such a world.