2011 was a boring year in tech. Not because there weren’t any cool new products and technology released, but by the fact that Apple is again the big winner of the year in the consumer market. I’m kinda bored by this already. It’s been quite a long time since I last envied a friend’s gadget because my iThing wasn’t so interesting. But there were some interesting non-Apple news along the way I’d like to comment.
But first, I’ll talk about Apple and why it’s the year’s big winner. It started the year releasing the iPad 2, which was a huge success and helped the company to continue its domination over the tablet market. The way things are now, there are two markets: one for Apple and another for the other to kill each other.
Then there was Mac OS X Lion, which established a new way of buying a PC operating system by being (initially) distributed only via the Mac App Store. The last release of OS X was a huge success, introducing to the PC market the convenience of multitouch gestures people already were familiar with, due the popularity of mobile touch screen devices, plus a series of improvements that help ordinary people to use their computers more efficiently.
Later, we got the iPhone 4S. It was a bit disappointing for many people, since it was just an incremental update over the iPhone 4. I tend to explain that it didn’t make sense to release an all-new iPhone 5 at the time since most people in the US buy phones with a 2-year contract and it would be a great frustration for all the millions of people who bought an iPhone 4 last year. Anyway, back to the topic… The iPhone 4S was great because of the new assistent AI, Siri. Its technology will be very important in the next years (we’ll talk more about this later) and Apple smartly saw this.
There was also iCloud, the only consumer-oriented cloud service that actually works (well, most of the time). The combination of usual sync services they already had in MobileMe, plus the new iTunes Match feature makes it unbeatable for now.
And to complete the painting, Apple renewed all its personal computer line, bringing the MacBook Air up-to-date with the Sandy Bridge Core i5/i7 processors, and incrementally improving iMacs, MacMinis and MacBook Pros. All of this means that Apple probably has the best devices in all segments: smartphones, tablets, notebooks and desktops. Integrate all of those to a great platform and we have a very competitive product line to beat.
Of course, there was a huge setback in-between — the death of Steve Jobs. But despite that, the company seems to be on the right track and will probably continue to thrive under the leadership of Tim Cook.
Apart from Apple, another big winner this year was IBM. I know I’m biased to talk about this, but Watson put the big blue on the mouths of ordinary people again. I think this is the first time since the company sold the PC division to Lenovo that people are talking about IBM again on the streets. For me, after working on the POWER7 processor for years, it’s very satisfying to see all this.
Watson is important because its technology of natural language processing and AI will be key for services offerings in the following years, both on the enterprise and consumer markets. In this regard, IBM and Apple are well positioned against their competitors.
Speaking of which… I don’t know what the hell is going on with HP and Google. The first doesn’t seem able to find its own butt with a map and the latter is going through a series of random hits (ICS) and misses (almost everything it’s done on the web). HP looks like a lost case and it seems to me it’s going to be a printer ink cartridges seller, since it’s probably the only profitable thing there anyway. I’d like to take a closer look at Google, though.
Google spent most of the year doing a major overhaul on its web services. Some features added to some services, some services slashed, and a noticeable UI face-lift for visual consistency. First, I think it’s good to focus, so slashing useless services like Buzz in favor of Google+ is a good thing. On the other hand, it stripped Google Reader off a lot of features and later released Google Currents. Why didn’t it kill the former? These ambiguous decisions are hard to understand, really.
The UI updates are another thing that I don’t get. Some designs are very stupid and counter-intuitive (new GMail, for instance) and as far consistency goes, they’re not doing a good job. Why do I get a lime ooze green online icon on the Google+ chat widget and a darker green icon on the GMail chat thing? They can’t even keep color consistency across their logos on the various services sites.
Another thing that is not going well is Google+. It started promising and then lost momentum. Lack of a proper API, a suckastic limited mobile app and featureless web interface are some of its problems. But the biggest problem is that few people are actually using it. From what I can see, only geeks and spammers are using it heavily. It’ll be hard to keep up with Facebook and Twitter like this.
What about Chromebooks? I haven’t heard anyone talking about them since the release. Is that because it’s ahead of its time, or because the vision of having all the computing experience inside a web browser is flawed? Probably option 2.
On the other hand, this was probably the best year for Android. Although Honeycomb didn’t really take off (probably because of a pathetic app selection), Ice Cream Sandwich seems to bring Android very close to iOS, OS-wise — it’s elegant, has some great new features and will unify the phone and the tablet OS versions. On the platform size, though, Google has to improve. Its digital media services are still no match for the iTunes ecosystem.
But Android has to worry about another competitor: Amazon. Its Kindle Fire is no iPad killer, but it will steal some market from Android tablets due to its low price point and great offer of digital media. The Fire is probably the only piece of good news in the consumer market this year. It’s no iPad, but it’s selling like hotcakes — partly because of its low price, but mostly because it’s integrated to a great platform (see, Google?).
For 2012, I expect Apple to continue its good work, I hope Google can fix its screwups and I’m curious about what Microsoft will do. No one is talking about it and it’s just pulled out of CES entirely. Is it going the IBM way? Let’s wait and see.
Meanwhile, have a great holiday!