It was not in medicine or biotech, where the news has been on the political front, and the magic bullets of genomics are proving elusive.
It was not in search. Bing avoided being scoffed at, but it has not upended search or put any real scare into Google. Wolfram Alpha never understood my queries the handful of times I played with it.
Social media are in contention. This was the year that Facebook and Twitter made the big time. My brother in law offered an alternate view, unkindly calling Facebook ‘AOL for the 21st century.’ Sites that depend on coolness are always at risk from a newer, cooler site, but having an online social presence has gone mainstream, like email a decade ago.
Mobility has also gone mainstream, and the iPhone edges out the Kindle as Gadget of the Year – not its debut, but the year you couldn’t avoid it if you wanted to. But as one commentary noted (alas, I forgot to bookmark it so I can’t link it), the more powerful smartphones become, the more they become just another way to go online. Mobile will merge into the Internet.
Which makes this the year of the Cloud. It isn’t a gadget, and it doesn’t have the pop culture visibility of social media, because cloud computing is inherently a back end technology. Most of the time we don’t know, care, or think about where our applications and data are stored, only that we can get at them (and other people can’t).
But as I’ve suggested previously, mobility reinforces the push toward the cloud. So long as you only have one computer, local storage is simple and convenient. But once you also have a mobile device, you want handy access to your apps and files – meaning they have to be available to you online, and it no longer really matters where they are stored, only that they are secure.
So I designate cloud computing as our official TecTrend of the Year for 2009. Stay on top of industry news with TecTrends Reporters, and you won’t have to wait for another New Year’s Eve to know next year’s trends.