2000–2010: How things have changed

The year was 2000.

The dot­com bub­ble was close to its peak and those of us who were for­tu­nate enough to be part of it felt as it we were on top of the world. A new mil­len­nium was on its way and, though many of us felt cau­tiously opti­mistic, any sense of rea­son seemed to have dis­ap­peared as our for­tunes hit stratos­pheric highs.

We didn’t know then that the stock mar­ket would crash. We didn’t know then that most dot­com com­pa­nies would crash. We didn’t know then that the tow­ers would crash.

Maybe we were too young, too inno­cent to really com­pre­hend what would come next. Back then, Pres­i­dent Clin­ton was pre­sid­ing over a coun­try that had seen an almost unprece­dented eco­nomic expan­sion built on the inno­va­tion of count­less mem­bers of my gen­er­a­tion, who had worked day and night to turn dreams of a new future into an indus­try that had come to dom­i­nate much of the country’s mindshare.

We didn’t know then that, in the ensu­ing year, the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion would end up with a coun­try deeply divided over its legit­i­macy. This divide would reign for most of the decade (some would argue it still largely exists today) and force many of us to grow up politically.

We didn’t know about the bruis­ing eco­nomic crash that would end up wound­ing us psy­cho­log­i­cally, forc­ing us to real­ize some of our own fail­ures as promis­ing dot­coms after promis­ing dot­coms were forced to shut­ter their doors, along with many not so promis­ing ones, because they had the unfor­tu­nate mark of being on the internet.

And we didn’t know that the scent of fail­ure that had come with many of those clo­sures would only be erased by some­thing worse, some­thing deeper, and prob­a­bly even more scar­ing, as we were faced, for the first time, with the con­cept of large-scale mor­tal­ity. For those of us liv­ing in New York that tragic day in Sep­tem­ber, the world did end on that day, only to be rebuilt in a dif­fer­ent by every one of us. Some escaped, leav­ing the city entirely; oth­ers escaped, liv­ing every­thing, from job to inno­cence, they had known pre­vi­ously; few went on and tried to adapt; all were forced to grow up, in some way.

We didn’t know that, against a back­drop of war and destruc­tion, inge­nious peo­ple were work­ing on a newer set of web tech­nolo­gies that would help real­ize many of the dreams we had dared to dream in the pre­vi­ous decade. RSS was still the domain of a few geeks, and pod­cast­ing (let alone the iPod) didn’t exist. Watch­ing movies on the net was some­thing we hoped for but didn’t get. There were a few pock­ets of sites where watch­ing videos was pos­si­ble but this was not a main­stream activity.

Apple was known as an also-ran, hav­ing been van­quished by Microsoft, the giant from Red­mond, which seemed to be unde­feat­able, hav­ing essen­tially man­aged to route Netscape, the sin­gle largest threat to its busi­ness. We thought that the com­pany with the best chance to beat Microsoft might be the com­pany that had fig­ured out how to give inter­net access to most of Amer­ica: AOL. AOL was so big that peo­ple were won­der­ing which tra­di­tional com­pany it would acquire. Early in Jan­u­ary 2000, the response came as it acquired (the polite news intel­li­gentsia said merged with) Time-Warner, lead­ing to one of the most dis­as­trous merger in his­tory (dis­as­trous, that is, for Time-Warner. AOL itself might not be around today, had it not pulled off that feat.), a deal that, in a sense defined the decade in its tim­ing. It was the last hur­rah of the dot­com era and, in Decem­ber 2009, AOL spun back out of Time-Warner, going back to NASDAQ after hav­ing sucked a lot of blood out of Time-Warner.

MP3 play­ers were for geeks but they were seen as increas­ingly cool because of an appli­ca­tion called Nap­ster, which allowed peo­ple to share their music over the inter­net, some­thing that was sit­ting in a very gray area from a legal stand­point (the music indus­try would call it ille­gal and win in court; con­sumers called it shar­ing and grew embit­tered with the music indus­try). Since there were no stores to buy music online, most peo­ple felt that it was going to be the route Nap­ster would even­tu­ally take. But Steve Jobs, who didn’t like being con­sid­ered an also-ran, had a dif­fer­ent idea and, with his team, was putting the fin­ish­ing touches on a device that would change the music indus­try: the iPod.

In an amus­ing turn, the iPod, over sev­eral gen­er­a­tions, grew to get a near monop­oly on the enter­tain­ment device mar­ket and Microsoft, itself accus­tomed to monop­o­lies, didn’t make a dent in its mar­ket. The iPod begat the iPhone, which itself was not just a phone but pro­vided enough power (that is, roughly the power of a PC circa 2000) to be a full-fledged portable com­puter. Along the way, Apple extracted some con­ces­sion from its tele­phone com­pany part­ner, open­ing up the mar­ket for a whole series of changes in the telco world. I would ven­ture that, at this point, Apple, with the iPhone, is just about where Microsoft was with Win­dows circa 1995.

Back then, social net­works were largely phys­i­cal, and it was some­times dif­fi­cult to locate an old acquain­tance. Friend­ster dom­i­nated that space at the begin­ning of the decade, to be replaced by MySpace and later Face­book. Few peo­ple kept touch with as many friends and it was actu­ally pos­si­ble to loose someone’s con­tact information.

Back then, we believed in eras­ing things from a hard drive, in order to make up space as it was pos­si­ble to actu­ally fill one’s hard drive.

Back then, “the cloud” was only used to talk about the white stuff in the sky and only birds “tweeted;” “Real-time” was a term gen­er­ally reserved for stock infor­ma­tion, and “live feed” was some­thing only TV tech­ni­cians wor­ried about.

So as we enter a new decade (I know some might quib­ble that the decade really only starts in 2011), let’s look for­ward to a joy­ful and inter­est­ing decade, one filled with the accom­plish­ments of many and the dreams of most.