2008: Imagine what a year it was in tech

2008: Imagine what a year it was in tech
by: Wayne MacPhail

Imagine this is December, 2008, a full year in tech from now. Here's what's happened in the last twelve months…

Early this year, at January's MacWorld, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced not only a 3G iPhone, which finally appeared in June, but also a ultra-portable Macbook. It was a thin thing of beauty in an Audrey Hepburn sort of way, not in an Olsen-twins, needy-whippet manner. It took the best of the aluminum-encased industrial design of the MacBook Pro and added in the multi-touch goodness of the the iPhone and created a mobile device that finally breathed life into the struggling niche of tablet computing and gave amazon's ass-ugly Kindle a run for its nickels and dimes.

It was a great year for Linux. Not only did it end up powering a collection of tiny laptops from Asus, Everex, the OLPC project and others, but it also solidly moved away from its nerd-hippie tendency to be easy-to-use until it really mattered (like when you want to run a Quicktime movie or get a wireless card working). Many people installed it on their parents’ machine, telling them it was an XP upgrade.

Meanwhile, Microsoft was like a Goliath that kept getting hit by well-aimed rocks, none to the temple but a couple to the tender bits. Vista was officially labelled a wounded dog. It wasn't put out of our misery, but it did let Apple's and Linux's marketshares both slouch toward two digit numbers. And, Redmond wound up looking like a white collar crack dealer in the Third World as it tried to run the Online Laptop Per Child project into the ground with its TFHWF (The First Hit of Windows is Free) program, that went head-to-head in developing countries with the Linux-based, under $200 laptop from MIT.

In Canada, changes to the Copyright Act, which were supposed to be introduced about this time in 2007, wound up being delayed, thanks to lobbying of activists from across the country. When the changes did get introduced, there were concessions to consumer rights, but the proposed alternations still had the stale perfume of the U.S. government and record labels all over them.

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