2011 in retrospect

Looking back at the year this last day of the year the following tech stories stood out.


Social Media fueled Arab Spring

This year social media like Facebook & Twitter truly became mainstream, they are no longer something the tech elite use. They have also reached a critical mass that allows an innocuous looking post to to spread across the society like a wildfire and snowball into something thats capable of bringing down decades old deeply entrenched autocracies.



Evolution of more natural UX

This year also saw maturing of technologies like Voice control (think Siri), Touch (think iPhone) & gestures (think XBox Kinect) becoming more mainstream and ubiquitous. This sets the stage for changing the way we all  interact with devices.. We are already seeing some of these technologies that matured in the mobile space bleeding into mainstream OSes (Mac os Lion & Metro UI in Windows 8). If the trajectory continues very soon we will be using touch/gestures/voice control on most of our devices at home.



Rise of HTML5

This year saw Adobe finally concede defeat and adopt HTML5 as the defacto standard in developing UI. This is a great news for developer community as they can focus on building great apps and not worry about rehashing the same app using different technology stacks. Dream of having the same app run on the  phone, computer, TV, set-top boxes, tablets etc came much more closer this year.



Rise of Android

Android has finally matured to be an formidable competitor to the iOS ecosystem. Being an open platform facilitates this wide adoption. Today android has become the defacto  platform to build an smart device on. Apple due to its lead had locked up the supply chain, meaning that competitors had to either compromise on quality or have their wares at higher prices. But seeing Amazon enter this market in a big way with its “razor and blade” strategy was an interesting development. Amazon has a wide variety of content and thus can afford to subside its devices and thus pose first serious challenge to Apple.



Passing away of Steve Jobs

Steve’s life can be summed up nicely by borrowing one of the Apples motto “think different”. By doing so he fundamentally changed multiple industries, created new ones and forced others to imitate him. In my opinion his biggest contribution to the tech world was as he called: merging liberal arts with technology. One can argue has made technology much more accessible to the masses and caused the first four things listed above to happen. Dots are there to connect him to arab spring!  His passing away brings an era to end, but hopefully his legacy will live on and the lessons learned will be built upon and thus, the technology will continue to be simplified, digested and prepared for mass consumption.