The end of year is a time to look back and look forward. Everyone right now is listing the ‘top tech stories of 2010’ and I’m going to take a turn too. In my mind three stand out in particular: the iPad, Net Neutrality and WikiLeaks.
Apple’s launch of the iPad was quite an event, with the inevitable media frenzy whipping the tech writers and apple fanboys into quite a lather. The fact that the device was indeed a hit product – one of the hottest consumer tech gadgets of the year – shows that Apple can not only innovate within an existing product family (phones, computers, music players) but can also single-handedly create a whole new category, in this case the tablet computer. Yes, I know previous versions of this type have been around before in both tablet and PDA form factors. But Apple was the one that made this a successful product. Look at how many imitators it has spawned, all trying to ride in Apple’s tailwind.
The iPad puts another nail in the coffin of the desktop boat-anchor. Mobile computing – personalized, ubiquitous, cool – is the wave of the computing future. We will see business computing follow this trend as well. A very powerful side-effect will be a further blurring of our personal and business lives.
Net neutrality has been a huge issue for the last two years. Network providers have for years wanted (and planned) to offer tiered access services – offering preferential treatment for customers who pay more. Along with that, of course, is discrimination against customers who don’t pay. The FCC opposed this, and proposed rules that would establish (or retain, really) what came to be called net neutrality. At its base is the requirement to treat all packets the same: first in, first out. The FCC, by a vote of 3 to 2, gave net neutrality the full force of regulation in late December.
This is not going to be the end of the story. Big business interests, like the networks and the big media conglomerates, along with several members of congress (all Republican) are vowing to fight the new rules through legislation and lobbying. Supporters of NN – and I am firmly one of them – claim that innovation and competition will be stifled by tiered services. Opponents claim that networks will not be sufficiently incented to make continued investment in broadband. The fight will be on in 2011 and beyond.
Finally, who hasn’t heard enough about Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks story? Like net neutrality, this was another collision of technology with politics, and the story has too many sides to it to rehash here. And it’s by no means over yet, with Assange released on bail in the UK, fighting extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges, and the US considering an indictment as well.
Whether you applaud or decry what WikilLeaks has done, certain conclusions have to be drawn. First, the world of journalism continues to undergo revolutionary change. There are no gatekeepers anymore; back when Daniel Ellsberg performed a similar act of information liberation, in the Vietnam era, his outlets were the New York Times and the Washington Post. Now anyone with access to a web server (in other words, anyone at all) can be their own news outlet. But with the demise of the news gatekeepers comes the demise of the fact checker. Anyone can post anything at all, and if the story catches on, it can go viral and do damage. Think of the prank death reports of celebrities like Paris Hilton and Matt Damon. Closer to home here in Philadelphia is the story of the still-at-large Kensington Strangler: a fake Facebook post identified some innocent guy in the neighborhood and within a day, you guessed it, the lynch mob was at the door. (Luckily, so were the cops).
Mark Zuckerberg is misquoted as saying that the age of privacy is over, but the WikiLeaks story may be telling us that the age of secrecy is over. Will all information eventually be free, like it or not? An old saying is that ‘truth is the daughter of time.’ But perhaps it should be amended as ‘full disclosure is the daughter of time.’
I think the iPad, net neutrality and WikiLeaks will have some serious impacts in 2011 and beyond. Does anyone have a different view?
1 comment:
I agree with your assessment that the iPad, Net Neutrality, and WikiLeaks are three of the Top Tech Stories of 2010. I would add that Enterprise 2.0, while not necessarily a specific news story, will be as big an influencer of the next decade as those noted. The rapid growth of the collaborative enterprise is disruptive in its transformation of businesses' reliance on information as an enabler of agility and growth to relationships as those enablers. When paired with cloud-, context based-, and pattern based-computing along with mobility (and Apple is leading the way here)Enterprise 2.0 and social networking will have transformational effects over the coming decade.
Post a Comment