Ok, most people would say that the Ipod has been the biggest hit of the latest ten years in the personal technology space and who am I to disagree. While there is no doubt, that the Ipod is a style icon and a wonderful piece of industrial design, there are a plethora of other digital technologies that can make a case for the crown of personal technology of the decade. Below, I will name but a few, that in my opinion, were innovative and clever enough to make a significant difference to the way in which an individual interacted and benefited from using their personal computer.
I also name what I think were the technology releases and events that promised so much in many cases but failed to deliver miserably. Let’s hope that vendors, Internet service providers and policy makers can learn from the mistakes of the last ten years and get it right for the next digital decade.
Stephen Cawley – Editor
Winner
Integrated security suites
The biggest movers in the PC protection business, Symantec and McAfee, sell software to protect your computer from various online thugs. Thanks heavens, both companies have updated their suites so that one installation routine delivers better anti-virus programs, spam filters, and firewall protection. Besides saving you money, these integrated suites give you a single, interface for setting up, controlling, and regularly updating the programs. In addition, both suites offer better parental-control tools than you’ll find in the also-available stand-alone packages.
Winner
Wi-Fi integration in notebooks
In 2002, Intel launched its Centrino product offering –which integrated a processor, chipset and wireless networking capability in one laptop computer.
The inclusion of Wi-Fi – 802.11a at the time – was the big win for remote workers who traveled through international airports, hotels and cafes and were able to get access to affordable and sometimes free broadband Internet from a light notebook that had a long battery life.
Winner
Home wireless networking kits
Now running at speeds of up to 54Mbit/s, wireless networking kits allow us to share broadband among multiple computers all over the house without wires, wireless routers with gateways and wakeup LAN features allow remote workers to get access to files on any computer in the office from home, while Wi-Fi in the home has also breath life into console gaming with players battling it out wirelessly all over the world.
Loser
ROM cards
Yes we all remember them. The dreadful idea of replacing your suave little paper-based business cards with CD ROM-based equivalents. Of course, the benefit being able to produce a ROM card was that your recipient could drill down through hundreds of megabytes of additional and unnecessary information about you and your company when they got back to their desktop PCs. I don’t think so.
Loser
Service packs and software updates for Windows and Office
Bill Gates has just been quoted as saying that there will be two beta releases of Longhorn – Microsoft next generation Windows operating system set for lunch in 2006. Let’s hope the boys from Richmond get to iron out all of the creases in this OS before it finally hits retail. Is it too much to expect that the world’s most profitable software company might release software that continually requires its user to download patches and service packs to correct it vulnerabilities?
Loser
Premium-subscriptions to online news services
We all got used to free content on the Web and we never expected that, in time, we would have to pay for it. After the Dot Com crash in 2001, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times read the signs of harder times and released premium services. Locally, The Irish Times soon followed suit and now offers access to premium new content for EUR*50 per annum and email and storage for EUR*30 at Ireland.com. Thankfully the Irish Independent (www.unison.ie) still haven’t gone down the pay for content route.
Winner
Blackberry
Phone access, SMS and email on the go. Who could ask for more? Well web browsing would be nice too and you get all these things in the Blackberry from Research In Motion. When these devices were originally launched in 1999, most observers in the industry didn’t give them a hope in hell of becoming a success, now they are seen as must-have fashion accessories and are being resold by both Vodafone and O2. The 7100v model deserves a closer look what with its colour screen, push e-mail function and smart looks.
Loser
Irish attempts to set up online auctions
Ebay now has its own Irish site and will compensate for the fact that both Ebid.ie and Buy and Sell failed to capture the Irish public’s collective imagination, despite launches with plenty of fanfare.
Winner
Multiplayer gaming
Massive multiplayer online role-playing games or MMORPGs are now the premium assets of the gaming industry what with the success globally of Doom, Quake, Half Life and World of Warcraft online gaming worlds. On the console side, Xbox Live! has given Microsoft a solid lead over Sony who really hasn’t create a viable online alternative for the Playstation 2.
Winner
Palm handhelds
These handheld organisers proved a hit with men who were so organised they didn’t need an organiser in the first place. Techies also loved them because they could be hacked and loaded with software to do all sorts of clever things. They won out over Windows CE equivalents because of their simplicity and ease of use. Then, Handspring came along and showed Palm that a clever upgrade module could convert a handheld organiser into a camera, a GPS receiver and or a web browser.
Winner
Half-Life
Developed by Valve Software in 1998, this first person shooter was heralded by critics for its in-depth gripping storyline which would influence the development of other first-person shooters in the years to come. Its own success continued for years with expansions such as Opposing Force, mods such as Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, and its sequel Half-Life 2.
Winner
Direct X
Originally called Game SDK and first developed by Microsoft in 1994, Direct X forms the basis for PC gaming as we know it. It provides the Application Programming Interfaces or the APIs required for the development of computer games for Windows.
Winner
Javascript
Originally developed by Brendan Eich in Netscape under the name of Mocha, this language is best known for its uses in websites and for the ways in which it allows for online properties to include animations and interactive objects.
Winner
Ilife
A suite of easy to use applications, Ilife allowed Apple to convince less than tech savvy home computer users that they could become digital creative geniuses on their Imacs. The funny thing was they could try using Imovie to create Hollywood-like home movies and Idvd to burn them to disc. It works a treat.
Winner
USB key storage
This invention was simple but brilliant. Replace redundant and low capacity floppy drives with high capacity USB plug and play and miniature keys that slot into the back of your PC and show up as hard drive on ‘My Computer’. Starting out with capacities of 16Mbytes, these data saviours can now be bought with capacities of up to 1Gbyte.
Winner
Div X
Technically brilliant, a video codec which allows movie buffs to compress digital video to a tenth of its size without any noticeable loss in quality. The advantage being that a movie that once required a DVD to store it can now be stored on a CD. Unfortunately, Div X like MP3 in music circles has become infamous because it is used by pirates to bootleg and distribute copyright music.
Loser
Unison Internet box
Web TV. Does anyone remember that? Still available for EUR*252, the Unison TV Internet box was a nice idea in 2000 when it was launched by the Irish Independent’s ISP division, but it was let down by the fact that the web browser look pixilated and blocky on a TV screen, and by the fact that its cut down operating system neither supported the playback of audio or video downloaded from the Internet, or access to chatrooms that were built on java.
Loser
Portable media players
Early days for these Swiss pen knife devices designed to offer videos, photos and music from one device. The models that we have seen from Archos, Creative and Iriver are difficult to use, for example just how do you get footage from your TV to the device. Answers on a postcard please? Furthermore, who will invest in a device that offers a screen just 7 inches in size for over EUR*600 when they can buy a portable DVD player these days for under EUR*200? I will take some convincing that these devices will ever take off.
Loser
First generation WAP phones and mobile services
We used to joke that WAP meant ‘Where are the phones?’ and with good reason. With a ticker tape-style launch and a blockbuster movie tie-in with the Matrix, 1999 was to be the year of the Internet on the mobile phone. Unfortunately Nokia and the mobile operators overpromised and undelivered. What we got was a limited supply of handsets, greyscale screens and text services that were slow to download.
Winner
Iomega Zip Drive
Available originally in 1995 as a 100Mbyte product, it was launched at a time when average hard drive sizes were still measured in hundreds of Mbytes and the only other removable media was the floppy drive. Low cost, re-writable CDs and DVDs, external hard drives and USB memory keys were still the stuff of dreams. Zip revolutionised the way we manage our data and it was an instant success. In the 10 years since its launch over 55 million drives have been sold worldwide and a total of over 330 million Zip disks. Iomega continues to sell both 250Mbyte and 750Mbyte capacities.
Loser
First generation Nokia Ngage
You must remember the disaster that was the first generation Ngage gaming phone. Firstly, you had to remove the battery when you wanted to insert or remove a game card and secondly it looked like you were holding a sandwich to your ear each time you wanted to make a phone call. The second generation model offered slight improvements.
Loser
Sega Dreamcast
This second generation console made it to the market before the Playstation 2 but lost out in the marketing war to Sony. We liked it though what with its impressive technical specs and features. It was the first 128 bit console, offered 4 controller ports, mini games through the controllers, built-in 56k modem for online gaming, and high quality games such as Soul Calibur and Sonic Adventure. Technically a hit, commercially it was way off the mark.
Winner
Creative Jukebox
Ok, the DAP jukebox was probably the largest MP3 player ever made but with its 6Gbyte hard drive and ability to hold over 150 hours of albums, it was revolutionary in 2000 and it got to market before the Apple iPod.
Loser
DVD incompatibility
DVD RAM, DVD R+, DVD R-, etc. So many conflicting DVD formats and yet the technology is likely to be replaced by either Sony’s Blue Ray disc technology or Toshiba’s HD technology in the very near future. The latter gets Bill Gates vote of confidence. Oh no, two more conflicting standards go to war.
Loser
NTL’s acquisition of Cablelink’s cable infrastructure for IR#535million caused a storm in the telecoms and Internet industry in 1999. Ireland with its heavily cabled towns and cities was seen as the perfect springboard for the rapid adoption of broadband for always on Internet and video on demand services. In the end, NTL had underestimated the cost of upgrading cable to the co-axial capability required to deliver broadband services and its executives had got carried in the economic bubble that existed at the time. Today, NTL’s cable Internet service is still only available in pockets of its network.
Winner
Peer to peer Internet telephony
Skype means free international phone calls from one PC to another and calls from a PC to a phone don’t cost a whole lot more. Now that you can get phone handsets such as the Cyberphone that plug directly into the PC, the experience has got even better.
Winner
Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements
Adobe’s idea to offer professional quality photo editing and video editing functions in a package designed to be user-friendly enough for consumers was a brilliant one. The affordable street price of these applications (EUR*151 for the bundle of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements) makes it an even stronger hit.
Loser
Corel Linux
Through the 90’s with its WordPerfect offering, Corel had long been at loggerheads with Microsoft for control of the productivity suite on the desktop PC. In 2000, its adoption of open source Linux as a consumer-friendly version that could be installed on a partition of a hard drive, was a drive to get control of the operating system space. It failed miserably. Mandrake and Suse have since taken over the fight.
Loser
Product activation
This process, marketed by the likes of Microsoft, Intuit and Adobe as a anti-software piracy move, controls software licenses by limiting installation, usually to just one computer. It generally associates the program’s unique product key, entered during installation, with a randomly generated number or a ‘fingerprint’ of the computer’s hardware configuration that is then transmitted to the vendor’s server. If, on subsequent installations, the product key is paired with a different random number or fingerprint, the user must explain why no license violation has occurred. To many customers who have purchased the software, it is a cumbersome, time consuming and unwieldy process.
Winner
AMD Athlon Classic
The original Athlon was the first seventh-generation x86 PC processor and initially it achieved and retained a performance lead over Intel’s competing processors for a significant period of time. It was particularly popular with enthusiasts who built PCs purely for gaming.
Loser
Intel Celeron
The Celeron was a family of budget PC processors launched by Intel. The first generation Celerons produced a poor performance due to their low second level memory cache of 128k when more expensive Pentium chips sported 512k worth of second level cache and allowed for quicker multitasking.
Loser
PSP decision to use UMD
Sony Computer Entertainment’s new portable gaming device, set for launch in September, looks the biz but features a storage format that will undoubtedly send shivers down the spines of those who dread proprietary formats. Universal Media disk or UMD offers a storage capacity of 1.8Gbyte but significantly less than the 4.7Gbytes a DVD disc can hold. Nevertheless, movies will be available for UMD that will look crisp on the PSP’s screen. However, we doubt whether consumers will be prepared to buy movies that will only play on their pocket-sized games console.
Panel:
<p>Future winners
Keyboards in the air
Imagine being able to project a full size, usable keyboard from your mobile phone or PDA onto any flat surface. A chip set from Canesta will make that possible by letting electronic devices perceive their surroundings in 3D so they can capture data like hand gestures or typing on a virtual keyboard. NEC has shown Tablet PC prototypes incorporating the technology, and several mobile phone manufacturers are reportedly on the case.
Green light for red light web zone
Yes the move to create a .xxx address to exist alongside other addresses like .ie, .com and .net is a progressive move to protect children from Internet pornography and adult services. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has decided to allow Canadian company ICM Registry to create a .xxx address alongside other addresses like .com and .ie. ICM Registry claims that by defining websites, it will be much easier to filter adult websites to stop children from viewing inappropriate content. Still the fact that this domain will be more expensive than standard domain name registrations and its use will not be made compulsory means that vigilance by parents will still be required.
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