NET RESULTS:EVERY YEAR in the technology sector, certain stories and trends stand out. Some are clearly ground-shaking even at the time they are happening, but others are more subtle in importance and their relevance emerges only over time.
Everyone will have a personal slant on the stories that mattered most in 2011, but these are the ones that stood out for me.
The rise of hacktivism
Hacktivism – using hacking as a tool for protest – began to emerge in earnest towards the end of 2010, when the group Anonymous launched denial-of-service attacks against finance companies that had pulled services from Wikileaks and made it impossible to make financial donations to the organisation.
Rolling on into 2011, hacktivists – possibly including Anonymous and a spin-off known as LulzSec – went after the Sony PlayStation network, compromising tens of millions of accounts and creating an embarrassing and costly headache for the company.
Hacktivists (again, probably including Anonymous and various affiliated groups) went after websites connected to Nato, Bank of America, child pornographers and security firm HBGary, among others.
Some arrests have been made, but the very nature of this distributed form of protest makes it hard to police and it is clear that online activists have found an effective and fearsome approach to expressing anger and frustration.
Social media and protests
On the flip side, technology – including the tools and techniques wielded by some of the hacktivist groups – was used to support an extraordinary string of pro-democracy uprisings which started in Tunisia and spread across the Arab world as 2011 progressed. Protesters inside their countries and supporters and hacktivists outside used technology – especially social media – to organise protests and get information about what was happening out to the world.
In late summer, however, London and other cities across Britain were battered by successive nights of rioting in which social media, particularly the BlackBerry messaging network, was used as an organising tool by rioters.
Ironically, many of the politicians who were supportive of the use of such technologies when it helped democracy protests now discussed whether social networks should be shut down in an emergency. In doing so, they ignored the fact that social media was also used to help people avoid danger during the riots and to organise community clean-ups afterwards.
HP derails
Industry observers as well as investors were stunned when HP suddenly announced in September that it would sell its PC division and cancel its just-launched tablet computer based on WebOS, which HP had recently purchased off Palm.
Former SAP chief executive Léo Apotheker, barely a year after his appointment as chief executive at HP, lost his job over these and other decisions. Not that onlookers were entirely reassured when former eBay founder and chief executive Meg Whitman took the helm as Apotheker’s replacement. Like her predecessor, Whitman has little experience of the hardware industry that forms much of the core of HP’s business. At least the PC division will stay, with Whitman saying it would be central to HP’s future.
Death of Steve Jobs
The passing of Apple co-founder and former chief executive Steve Jobs in early October will surely be one of the landmark deaths of the new century. His creativity and inventiveness in so many areas, his extraordinary sixth sense when it came to design, and his almost always spot-on marketing ability elevated the mercurial and sometimes controversial Jobs well above the standard entrepreneur. The global outpouring of grief upon his death indicated that Jobs had become an icon.
Patent litigation
The year 2011 was the year in which it seemed everyone was suing everybody else in tiffs over who owned the right to do what first – incidentally, a handy way to block competitors from launching products in various markets as complex cases dragged their way through the courts.
Patent litigation has always been a favourite tool in the technology sector, but this was a year in which every month seemed to reveal new legal fisticuffs between some of the biggest tech giants. In the mobile and tablet computer arenas in particular, bickering over patents sometimes seemed to take precedence over product releases. Apple, Samsung, Motorola Mobility, Google, Research in Motion, Microsoft – they were all at it.
Privacy
This was another year of privacy breaches: lost unencrypted laptops and USB drives; hacked accounts; medical records passed inappropriately to third parties; sensitive records exposed accidentally online; personal data quietly transmitted to third parties by websites and apps without users knowing; and social networks adding in “features” that riled privacy advocates and users.
Meanwhile, the European Commission said it was going to take another look at concerns about Europe’s data retention laws and would consider adding a “delete” clause, giving internet users the right to have information about them removed after a designated period. Digital privacy remains an incredibly prickly and complex issue that is not going to go away.
Initial public offerings
A battered global economy meant few technology companies had the appetite to go public in 2011. Though there was much talk throughout the year of pent-up interest and expectations, and a nostalgia for the good old days of massive initial public offerings (IPOs), investor sentiment was as volatile and unpredictable as the wider economy. Some companies, such as LinkedIn, Groupon and Zynga, took the plunge, but with varied results.
Roller-coaster valuations, sometimes including dips below the launch price, offered no reassurance to investors that technology companies, and particularly those involved in social media, were going to return to the days of instant millionaire-dom any time soon. All eyes will be on the almighty Facebook and its expected IPO in spring 2012.
