The decade began with all the promise of a tech-stock boom where you couldn't help but make hand-over-fist money. Alas, the dot-com bubble burst in March 2000 with the crash of the NASDAQ stock market. Then came 9-11, and whatever recovery there was didn't make it past 2008.
But in terms of pure technology, the Internet, the cell phone and digital everything continued a not-so-slow yet steady march into our lives.
Some companies thrived, others nearly folded, as we went from "You've got mail!" to using Google as a verb.
We communicated, worked, shopped, banked and played more and more online.
The analog world ended and everything became an endless string of 1s and 0s. Nobody seemed to open a window and yell to whoever would listen that they were mad as hell and were not going to take it anymore.
Maybe they'll let us know in 140 characters or less on Twitter.
Here are some highlights:
January 2000: AOL and Time Warner announce their merger. Coincidentally, the tech bubble is in the midst of bursting, taking the rest of the stock market with it.
2000: Google begins selling text-based advertising on its popular search engine, becoming by mid-decade the big dog in monetizing the Internet. By the decade's end, there are few pies in which a Google finger is not stuck.
2000: Craigslist, founded in 1995 and taken beyond San Francisco to nine other cities in this year, bring free classified-style ads to the Web, all but killing one of the newspaper industry's most reliable cash cows.
2000-05: Most computers come equipped with CD burners, enabling just about anybody to create music CDs and making the recorded music industry sue everyone it can while panicking over its increasingly tenuous future.
2000-01: Microsoft introduces the Windows 2000 and XP operating systems, bringing its corporate and consumer offerings together and setting up a decade of increasing domination on the business and home computer desktop.
2001: Apple introduces the iTunes application and iPod music player in the same year. Listening to music would never be the same.
2002: The online auction site eBay purchases the online payment site PayPal, making it easier than ever to buy lots of stuff you probably don't need.
2003: Apple opens the iTunes Music Store and becomes the gatekeeper for most digital music sales.
2003: The Skype audio service releases its first beta, allowing computer users to easily send and receive voice data over the Internet and skirt long-distance phone rates.
2003: MySpace launches, eventually becoming the premier social-networking site, only to be eclipsed by Facebook a few years later.
2004: Google goes public, with stock selling for $85 per share. Today those shares will run you $590, give or take.
2005: YouTube is founded by three ex-PayPal employees. Google buys it the next year, setting the stage for a lot of cool "see what my cat did" videos.
2006: Facebook, originally a way for college students to stay connected, opens to the public, prompting everybody and their grandmother to let everyone they've ever met know what they're doing at any given moment.
2006: Twitter launches and after a few years in obscurity becomes the communication medium of the moment for those who can limit themselves to 140 characters per "tweet."
2007: Apple announces the iPhone, which brings a computing sensibility, full Internet access and thousands of applications to the cell-phone platform, making every other phone except the Blackberry seem woefully obsolete.
2000-2009: Rise of the Web - As the decade got under way, more and more Americans had broadband connections at home and work, leading to such phenomena as "Cyber Monday" following the traditional "Black Friday" holiday-shopping kickoff. Broadband takes the Web from a text-and-small-images medium to an audio/video/ just-about-anything free-for-all.
2000-2010: E-mail takes over our lives and spam becomes more than a canned meat as our inboxes strain to keep up. Add social networking buddies, instant messaging and Twitter just to complicate things.
2005-2009: Newspapers struggle to survive in the age of free 24-7 Internet news. Dailies that thrived back when radio and TV emerged as competitors couldn't survive an explosion of free, searchable and seemingly infinite quantities of information available online.
2007-2009: Millions finally get comfortable with online banking via secure Web sites set up by the few remaining behemoth banks in the U.S.
2007: Amazon, now the nation's largest bookseller, introduces the Kindle electronic reader and offers thousands of titles for download. Paper books continue to be sold ... but for how long?
2007: The Netflix service announces that it has mailed 1 billion DVDs to customers of its video-subscription service. By 2009 the number hits 2 billion.
2007: Microsoft releases the Vista operating system, which turns out to be as unpopular as such tech duds as Windows Me and Bob.
2008: Founding CEO Bill Gates steps down from day-to-day duties at Microsoft, ceding control to new CEO Steve Ballmer.
2008-09: Even traditional computer servers, those beige boxes in backrooms that churned out files on corporate networks and across the Internet, were being replaced with "virtual" servers in what has become known as "the computing cloud."
2009: A tortured transition from analog to digital television becomes final in the U.S., bringing better pictures and sound to those close enough to the transmitting stations and frustrating the rest who haven't already turned to satellite and cable.
2009: Protests in Iran are seen by the world through cell-phone images, video and Twitter.
2009: Time Warner dumps AOL: The merger that never worked and went down as one of the worst in American corporate history is pretty much undone as AOL is spun off via an initial public offering.
2009: Despite his own near-death experience that resulted in a liver transplant, Apple's Steve Jobs is named CEO of the Decade by Fortune magazine.
2009: Microsoft makes up for its Vista misfortune with Windows 7, for which reviews are generally positive.
source : dailynews.com
