A Decade In Review (But Only 2009 to 2013)

Jonathan begins his look back on ten years in technology, exploring how the tech landscape has changed from 2009 to 2013. Learn about Jonathan's bad predictions, Uber's missteps and more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff
and Happy New Year. I'm your host, executive producer Jonathan Strickland,
and I am in I Heart Radio Land, where I'm
coming to you from twenty to talk about the past.

(00:28):
You see, I recently did a pair of episodes about
the big tech news stories of twenty nineteen. But now
we're in and I thought it might be fun to
look back at, you know, the big stuff that happened
over the previous decade. And I guess we're gonna see
how many episodes this takes up. Spoiler alert, it'll take
up to I wrote these notes before I got the

(00:51):
end of the second episode. I really just planned to
give high level details on most of these stories. I'm
not going into deep detail. Obviously. I spent two full
episodes just talking about two thousand nineteen, so I clearly
can't do the same for every single year. It would
go through half of So we're just gonna take sort
of a high level look at the big stories of

(01:11):
those years. And also, spoiler alert, we're not going to
cover twenty nineteen because I just did that. You'll hear
me say that a couple of times during these episodes.
I really want to nail that home, all right, So
let's begin with two thousand nine. Now, for those of
you who are curious, I had been with my previous employer,
how Stuffworks dot Com for two years at that point.

(01:35):
I had been hired in two thousand seven. I had
actually been podcasting since June of two thousand eight, so
two thousand nine would actually be my first full calendar
year of being a podcast host. But this pair of episodes,
these aren't really about me. I just thought it'd be
fun to start off with that. Much more important than
my career was the fact that the world was in

(01:57):
a global recession, largely on about by some frankly dumb
decisions made back in two thousand seven or so revolving
around subprime mortgages. But that is beyond the scope of
tech stuff. The effects went well beyond the real estate industry, however,
and many industries were hit hard by this recession. Tech

(02:19):
in particular was really struggling with this, and while there
were signs of recovery on the horizon, it was still
a pretty hefty recession covering the world for most of
two thousand nine. Now, the effect that was felt in
the tech world was felt by both established companies and
emerging ones. Several startups fizzled out for lack of funding.

(02:42):
Because investors were starting to hold onto their money more tightly,
they were less likely to invest because they were worried
about the outcomes. Advertising also took a huge hit in
two thousand nine, and since many web related businesses depend
largely or sometimes entirely, upon a tizing dollars, they really
felt that squeeze. Some companies were forced to layoff employees

(03:05):
and cost cutting measures, tightening up their belts to get
through the recession. Now, it wasn't all doom and gloom.
Two thousand nine was the year that Microsoft launched Windows seven.
That's hard for me to believe, but yeah, Windows seven
came out in two thousand nine. That version was meant
to be more streamlined and faster than the preceding version.

(03:27):
The one that came before that one was Windows Vista. Now,
in general, Vista had received some pretty mixed reviews, which
is being kind at of the reviews were pretty negative,
and the corporate world at large had stayed away from
adopting Windows Vista, largely due to those criticisms. So, in
other words, the big big customers, you know, big corporate

(03:51):
customers that would be using Microsoft, uh, you know, operating
systems on their their computers for all their employees, they
weren't signing on two Windows Vista, and so the company
had to do something about it. Many people saw Windows
seven as sort of a course correction from Microsoft, and
you would think that that would mean that Microsoft would

(04:11):
learn valuable lessons in this process and that it would
be able to take advantage of that experience when they
were ready to launch the next operating system version. But
as we will eventually see, that's not exactly how things
would shake out. Microsoft also struck a deal with Yahoo
in two thousand nine that would see Microsoft's search technology

(04:34):
bing power Yahoo searches and return Yahoo would sell ad
services for Microsoft. Now, this arose after Microsoft had led
a failed attempt and un welcome unsolicited attempt to acquire
Yahoo outright that fell through, so instead the two struck
this partnership. Meanwhile, over at Google, Google would release the

(04:56):
Chrome operating system in two thousand nine, which meant Google
was essentially acknowledging that it was going to go toe
to toe with companies like Microsoft. Now, unlike bigger, bulk
here operating systems like Mac OS or Windows, the Chrome
version of an operating system is much more lean and streamlined.

(05:17):
It moves most of the computational processes to the cloud
rather than on the device that the OS is installed upon,
so it's really only useful if you have a persistent
Internet connection. Google was responding to a trend that was
still in the process of emerging back in two thousand nine,
and that trend was that users were starting to rely
more on connected services and less on native programs running

(05:42):
on their own hardware. So, in other words, instead of
having a word processing program on your machine, you would
log into a web service where you would use a
web based word processing program. Now that being said, if
you look at the market share for operating systems on
dusk top and laptop computers and compare them against each other,

(06:03):
you will see that today Windows is still the overall
king by a landslide. Then in second place distant second
place is Apple's operating system, and then Chrome barely even
registers on the charts. So while Google did recognize a
growing trend in the way we access services that more

(06:24):
and more people are using mobile devices, for example, that
has not actually translated over that much into the laptop
and desktop world. People seem to still want to have
a more beefy device for those particular form factors. In
two thousand nine, some leaks revealed that Google was preparing
its own branded phone. Android phones were already on the

(06:47):
market in two thousand nine, and the iPhone had really
kicked off the smartphone era back in two thousand seven,
but Google was content at first just to create the
operating system and some apps and then would allow other
manufacturers to put that operating system on their phones. But
in two thousand nine, the company started handing out Nexus
one branded smartphones to Google employees, and it would take

(07:11):
a little while longer before these would become available for
the general public to purchase, but it did show that
Google was actually interested in getting into the hardware game
as well. Also in two thousand nine, Eric Schmidt, who
was Google's CEO at that time, resigned from the board
of directors over at Apple, and this was over concerned

(07:31):
that there might be a conflict of interest issue that
was growing there because now Google was getting into the
smartphone business, so he stepped down. Another Apple related event,
that happened in two thousand nine centered on the health
of co founder Steve Jobs. Now, Jobs had been in
treatment for pancreatic cancer in the past, and then he

(07:52):
took a medical leave of absence from Apple in January
two thou nine. The stated reason was that Jobs was
dealing with quote unquote a hormonal imbalance, but it later
came to light in June of two thousand nine that
he had actually received a liver transplant. The belated revelation
did not please investors, who felt that they were owed

(08:14):
more transparency regarding Jobs as health since his iconic leadership
was so intrinsically linked to Apple's performance. The incident also
prompted people to wonder what Apple would be like without
Jobs as CEO, and it would become a question that
we'd sadly get answers to only a couple of years later.
Now it's easy to forget that. Back into thousand nine,

(08:37):
the only cell phone carrier in the United States that
could hold the iPhone, the only one that supported the
iPhone was a T and T. Apple had signed an
exclusivity agreement with a T and T that lasted a
couple of years. That exclusivity would be used against both
Apple and A T and T as people reported dissatisfaction

(08:58):
with A T and T S three G coverage, and
competing cell phone carriers would claim that their own networks
were far more robust and reliable for fast connections, though
you would obviously have to use a different phone from
the iPhone because they couldn't support it. They couldn't carry
the iPhone at that point. Intel lost some fights in
court rooms around the world in two thousand nine, as

(09:21):
various agencies charged that the company was engaging in anti
competitive practices and using its dominant position in the market
as a way to squash competition. The EU Commission find
Intel more than a billion that's billion with a b
euro truly princely some Intel also settled an antitrust lawsuit

(09:42):
brought against it by a m D for another one
point to five billion dollars. And here's some other things
that happened in two thousand nine. Bitcoin launched in early
two thousand nine, and the digital cryptocurrency would introduce concepts
like blockchain to the tech world at large as a result,

(10:02):
and then over the years we would see the value
of a bitcoin go all over the place, going into
the stratosphere and diving deep and then going back up
again in a very crazy way. And to this day,
I think it remains more of a commodity than a currency.
It's still hard for me to imagine spending Bitcoin like

(10:23):
a like a regular currency. In two thousand nine, eBay
would sell off most of its steak in Skype did
so at a substantial loss. A couple of years after that,
Microsoft would acquire Skype for an astronomical eight point five
billion dollars. Also in two thousand nine, Palm, You guys
remember Palm. That's the company that dominated in the personal

(10:45):
digital assistant or a p d A industry for a
really long time. Well, in two thousand nine, it launched
the Palm pre. It was meant to be the smartphone
that would return Palm to prominence after it started to
lag behind competitors like Apple and Google. Although many tech
reviewers gave the pretty pretty positive reviews, they kind of

(11:05):
liked it, sales just didn't follow. They were just lackluster,
and the following year, HP would purchase Palm. In a
year after that, HP announced it was discontinuing production of
Palm devices. I could save that for the following years
I could have, you know, said all right, well, now
we're in two thousand etcetera, etcetera, But I figured it

(11:27):
made more sense to just kind of wrap it all
up in this one little spot. Oh and uh. Two
thousand nine was also the founding year for Maker Bought,
the three D printer company that brought additive manufacturing to
the hobbyists and consumer market. And also a little company
called Uber launched in two thousand nine. More on that

(11:47):
little company later, particularly in the next episode. All right,
so let's move on to that year. Microsoft introduced the
Connect peripheral for the Xbox three six cons Soul and
for those of you who don't know, the Connect has cameras,
including an infrared camera that can detect user movements and

(12:07):
gestures as inputs for games and other applications. It can
also use image recognition software so that it can authorize
a profile on a specific console, so that if you
stand in front of the Connect, it knows that you're
the one playing it, whereas if your roommate stands in
front of Connect, it goes to your roommates profile on
that same machine, et cetera. You can also pick up

(12:28):
voice commands through a microphone and to the hacker community,
the connect represented an interesting opportunity to leverage some cool
technology for us is far beyond a video game peripheral,
such as in robotic vision or three D scanning. Microsoft
would flip flop between being supportive towards these endeavors and

(12:50):
then locking down the connect to try and prevent unauthorized use,
and going back and forth between those two. While the
changing stance would irritate the hacking community, it didn't stop
people from finding new ways to take advantage of the technology. However,
as far as what the connect was actually intended to do,
it was largely a failure. Gamers cited a lack of

(13:11):
good games with compelling implementations of connect controls as a
reason for the peripheral's ultimate failure in the gaming space.
Oh and Sony would also debut its own motion control system,
the move now over. In Iran, computer scientists discovered a
type of malicious code called stucks net that had been

(13:33):
causing equipment failures in nuclear processing plants. The code would
ultimately cause centrifuges to operate at the wrong speed, damaging
the centrifuges to the point that they would no longer operate.
The implication is that the malware came from a state
sponsored source as a means of cyber warfare, It was

(13:54):
targeting Iran's nuclear infrastructure specifically. While no official acknowledgement has
ever urged as to which country or countries were behind
the development of Stuck's net, speculation generally points to Israel
and the United States as having developed it together. One
big consumer product that launched in was the iPad, which

(14:17):
I infamously predicted would be a failure. Before the iPad,
tablet computers had seen limited success, most of which was
limited to niche markets like the medical industry. No one
had made a tablet computer that succeeded in the general
consumer market. But Apple had already started to rack up
a history of creating markets where previously there were none,

(14:40):
And in January Steve Jobs announced the iPad, and at
the time we all snickered at the name, and then
the company was set on a path to yet another
home run success. Not only did the iPad selve very well,
it also inspired numerous other companies to produce their own
tablet computers, and it would take a couple of years

(15:02):
before anyone made a tablet that could really go toe
to toe with Apple's design in the market, but it
would eventually happen. Apple's iPhone four was in the spotlight
in Actually, it was in the spotlight a little earlier
than the company had anticipated, because an Apple employee accidentally
left behind a prototype iPhone four in a bar in California.

(15:25):
Someone swooped it up and quickly realized that despite the
fact that it was disguised as an iPhone three g S,
it was in fact an iPhone four Gizmoto then coughed
up several thousand dollars to get hold of the thing.
The whole affair was a pretty nasty mess, complete with
police actions and threatened lawsuits. When the iPhone four did

(15:47):
come out, it got some pretty harsh reviews. Consumer reports
stated that the antenna in the iPhone four was a
bit wonky and that the phone's reception wasn't always so
hot as a result. Apple disputed this review, then said,
you know what, maybe the problem is that you're just
holding it wrong. Yeah, this was the old holding it

(16:08):
wrong argument, saying people should just not hold the lower
left corner of the phone when they're making calls, because
that seemed to be what was blocking all the signals.
There are also reports that said that people inside Apple
had been warning that the placement of the antenna was
going to cause problems, but that Steve Jobs ultimately overruled
them because that design is what allowed the phone to

(16:29):
look the way it did. Now. Facebook would become the
world's most visited site in twenty ten, surpassing Google for
the first time in its history. At that point, Facebook
boasted almost half a billion users, which by today's standards,
almost seems quaint. The company also became the focus of

(16:49):
an Aron Sorkin film titled The Social Network And I
can't believe that movie came out all the way back
in in my head that movie is like three year
is old, but no, it came out. Oh and has
also when Magic Leap, the augmented reality headset company, came
into being, the company wouldn't have a commercial headset available

(17:11):
until two thousand nineteen with the Magic Leap one, which
retails for about The company was promising big, big things
and all the the demos and the the vision videos
that you saw were amazing, And um, I hear that
the response is a little more lackluster to the actual product,

(17:33):
But I haven't had my hands on it, nor have
I had it on my head, so I can't speak
from experience. All right, We've got more to talk about,
starting with in just a second, but first let's take
a quick break. We're picking up with two thousand eleven,

(17:54):
and I think one of the biggest stories that year
was the death of Apple co founder Steve Jobs. Now.
Jobs was a true icon in technology. He was known
to be demanding, sometimes to excess. He had high expectations,
and it was said little patients for those who failed
to meet those high expectations. He had been ousted from

(18:15):
his own company in the eighties, returned to take the
company back in the late nineties, and oversaw its meteoric
rise in consumer electronics with the release of products like
the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. He had stepped
down as CEO earlier in two thousand eleven, passing away
in October of that year. Many people in technology expressed

(18:36):
their thoughts and feelings and reaction to Jobs as passing,
including his Apple co founder Steve Wozniak, the then head
of Pixar, John Lassender, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, and even
US President Barack Obama. The tech world at large wondered
what would happen to Apple without jobs at the helm,
he was so tightly associated with the company that many

(18:58):
weren't sure if it would survive without him, and there
are still people to this day who wonder how different
the company would be if jobs had not passed away.
While jobs is passing was a dark moment in tech
for many. One bright spot in technology in eleven was
how it played an important role as people in the
Middle East use tech to help organize protests and revolutions

(19:19):
against oppressive governments. This was a time called the Arab Spring.
Technically it started right at the tail end of but
many of the major events would follow in countries like Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen,
and Bahrain. Al saw enormous organizational efforts among the population
in a move to force massive political and social change,

(19:42):
and tools like social media platforms played an important part
in those efforts. Over at Sony, the company found its
PlayStation network service hacked by someone or a group of
someone's who left a file titled anonymous on their servers.
That file contained the message we our legion in it.
The hackers were able to access email addresses and user

(20:05):
birth dates, and potentially other information, including credit card information.
In two thousand and eleven, Google shut down one social
media platform and launched another. The shuttered platform was Google Buzz,
which was a failed experiment that had launched in but
didn't get much traction. The new social media platform was

(20:26):
Google Plus, which initially got a lot of buzz itself
during its invitation only beta. Many folks in the tech space,
including tech journalists like yours, truly got early access, but
Google Plus wasn't really compelling enough to pull people over
off of Facebook, and Facebook had such momentum that it

(20:47):
wasn't going to give up the title for super heavyweight
champ of the world as far as social media goes.
Google would make some pretty radical decisions with Google Plus
down the road, such as requiring YouTube accounts to be
linked to a Google Plus account, and moreover, requiring YouTube
users to use their real names as opposed to a
screen name, which was a decision the company would walk
back on later. The platform stuck around longer than Google

(21:11):
Buzz did, but in April two thou nineteen, Google chose
to shut it down as well. Also in two thousand eleven,
Google made a bid to acquire Motorola for twelve and
a half billion dollars. It appeared as though Google was
intent on making its own hardware in addition to supplying
software to other original equipment manufacturers. Google would hold on

(21:32):
to the company for only a few years before selling
it in two thousand fourteen to Lenovo for two point
nine one billion. Google held onto some of the R
and D departments from Motorola and also held on to
a couple of thousand patents, but otherwise parted with its
prize possession. In September two thousand eleven, Amazon announced the

(21:53):
launch of the Kindle Fire, a low cost tablet with
a simple interface meant to take aim at a market
that couldn't afford Apple's pricier iPad. Android tablets were plentiful
in two thousand and eleven, but for the most part,
they weren't really making much headway. Amazon was able to
launch a tablet tied into its other services and make
it work, posing the first real competitor to the iPad

(22:16):
at that point. Going back to Apple for a second.
Two thousand eleven was when the world was introduced to
a new digital entity. SIRIE. The Virtual Personal Assistant, was
one of the first killer implementations. Many of the features
could be found in other services, but none had encapsulated
them the way Apple did, and Sirie was a big

(22:37):
hit as people immediately tried to find different ways of
making her or him say weird stuff. Adobe discontinued support
for the development of the Flash plug in for mobile
browsers that year as well. Flash was meant to help
web developers create dynamic web page elements and players, but
the creation of HTML five had largely superseded flashes useful us,

(23:00):
plus the plug in created potential security vulnerabilities. A year earlier,
Steve Jobs had pretty much slammed Flash, stating that no
Apple device would ever support it, So it didn't come
as a big surprise that Adobe decided to say farewell
to it. A. T and T had made a bid
to acquire Tea Mobile in two thousand eleven, but gave

(23:20):
up on that plan later in the year, and Snapchat
also became a thing in two thousand eleven. Oh and
Leo Apothica resigned from Hewitt Packard, being replaced by Meg
Whitman in eleven. Now let's move on to two thousand twelve.
You know, the year when the world ended because the
mayan calendar thing well. Early in two thousand twelve, the

(23:41):
tech community in the United States largely united in opposition
to two pieces of proposed legislation that we're going through
the various houses of government in the US. One was
the Stop Online Piracy Act otherwise known as SOAPA, and
the other was the Protect I p Act or PIPPA.
Both pieces of legislation sought to combat intellectual property theft

(24:04):
by limiting access to sites that were accused of housing
stolen material, and the proposals went even further than that.
They actually placed potential restrictions and finds on any companies
that would advertise on such sites or search engines that
would list such sites in their search results. So even

(24:25):
referring to or supporting the sites in any way, even
if if it was inadvertently, could get you fined. And
the way web advertising works is you might not know
where your ads are showing up. You might be working
with a firm that's securing ad space for your brand
on various sites. If one of those happened to be
one of these that would get targeted by these these

(24:47):
pieces of legislation, you could find yourself in hot water.
So there was obviously a lot of resistance to these,
so many major sites like Google protests of the proposals,
calling them overreach and censorship and perhaps even impossible bole
to implement, and ultimately neither proposal would be enacted into
law and they both fizzled away. Mega Upload founder Kim

(25:08):
dot Com formerly Kim Schmitz, was arrested in January two
thousand twelve on charges of housing and distributing pirated material.
His home in New Zealand was the site of a
massive police raid, and since then he has fought efforts
to extradite him to the United States for trial. The
case has made its way through the New Zealand court

(25:29):
system to the point where the next case will be
heard before the New Zealand Supreme Court, if they choose
to hear it. At that point, it will be decided
whether or not he will be sent to the US
for prosecution and trial. Right now, as it stands, the
decision is he can be extradited, so unless the Supreme
Court overturns that decision, he will ultimately have to face

(25:50):
trial in the United States at some point, But the
story is still unfolding today. Owen one super cool thing
to happen in two thousand twelve was that researchers at
the Large Hadron Collider found evidence that the Higgs Boson particle,
a theoretical particle that would explain why matter has mass,
actually exists. It's not just theoretical. That was super awesome,

(26:12):
And another super awesome text story of two thousand twelve
involved NASA landing the Curiosity Rover on Mars using a capsule,
lowering the rover to the surface of the planet using
a sky grain. That's hard to call any single element
of this operation the most impressive, because it's all amazing,

(26:34):
But to me, what was super nifty was that the
whole process had to happen through automation because the distance
between Mars and Earth means that there's a delay of
several minutes between when things are happening in one place
and when we can know about them in the other place.
It takes time for information to travel between the two points,

(26:55):
so that would mean that by the time we learn
about conditions on Mars, several minutes have already passed since
that moment happened. There's no way for us to be
able to control say a uh, you know, a drone
or a rover or a capsule from Earth that's moving
around Mars. The delay is too long, so it had

(27:17):
to be automated. Everything happen to happen just right for
this to work, and it did, and that is super cool.
It was also the year that Felix Baumgartner did his
spectacular space dive from a hot air balloon at the
very edge of space. That was a pretty amazing moment too.
I remember watching that with not a small amount of

(27:39):
anxiety as he plummeted through the atmosphere. NASA also retired
the space shuttles that year, and a space X capsule
docked with the International Space Station for the first time.
That was also the year that Blue Origin tested its
reusable rockets for the first time, although not with a
landing procedure that would wait a little bit longer. Plus,

(28:02):
this was around the time when private companies were starting
to seriously talk about mining asteroids. But let's let's get
a little more terrestrial. So you remember how back in
two thousand nine, Microsoft was able to reverse some of
the criticism directed toward it for the Vista operating system
by releasing Windows seven, and how the company managed it

(28:24):
to change course to help bring corporate customers back into
the fold. With that launch, we'll get ready for another
sharp turn because it's time to talk about Windows eight Baby.
Windows eight was a big change from earlier versions of Windows.
Microsoft was gambling on the rise of tablets and on

(28:44):
touch screen interfaces, and the Windows eight UY was evidence
of that gamble. Rather than a desktop of icons and
a menu with a full list of programs on the device,
the Windows eight Metro UI had apps on tie oles. Ideally,
you would use a touch screen interface to swipe through

(29:04):
the different options, selecting the one you wanted. You could
opt to use a slightly more traditional UI if you
wanted to, but it wasn't the default. Along with this
operating system, Microsoft also launched the Surface tablet. Now that
made sense. The tablet would be built to support the
OS and show off all of its Metro features, and

(29:25):
a lot of reviewers praised the Windows eight tablet when
it came to this implementation. They cited the look and
feel of the OS on the tablet was more robust
than what Apple's iPad could could provide, so they said,
in some ways, this is superior to Apple's iPad, But
there was one small problem a lot of people hated

(29:48):
the desktop version of Windows eight a lot, to the
point where there were a lot of people and companies
who treated eight the way they had treated Windows Vista,
by not adopting it, then holding for another course correction.
They would stick with Windows seven instead. Some places would
stick with an even older version, Windows XP, which was
not super smart, but you can kind of understand why

(30:10):
they went with it. The departure from the traditional UI
for desktop owners and the emphasis on touch screen interfaces
didn't really go over so well. Now. As I said
in an episode of tech Stuff last year, I think
a lot of people on laptops and desktops rarely, if ever,
used touch screen displays with their devices. It just it's

(30:30):
the kind of UY that makes more sense from a
tablet or smartphone form factor, but tends to be awkward
for other types of devices. Over at Yahoo, the company
hired away Marissa Meyer from Google. Meyer would become the
new CEO of Yahoo in an effort to shake things
up and turn things around for the bloated, stumbling company.

(30:52):
Many hoped she would be the source of energy that
the company needed, but lots of factors played into her tenure,
largely being viewed as a earlier Some but not all,
of those factors were under her control. Initially, the company
looked like it was on the right path, with climbing
stock prices and a shake up and leadership, but decisions

(31:13):
to do stuff like acquire Tumbler would prove to be wasteful,
and later still, the company would be at the center
of a truly massive data breach scandal, which I'll touch
on when we get there. Oh and uh. Google also
revealed its driver less car initiative in two thousand and twelve.
The company had been secretly conducting tests for a while,

(31:34):
but it became public in two thousand twelve. The initiative
would eventually evolve into its own spinoff startup company called
Weymo a few years later. Apple unveiled the iPhone five
in two thousand twelve and gave Google Maps the boot,
favoring the company's own Apple Maps app instead. But the
Apple version was a bit um lost in the weeds.

(31:58):
I guess. Users found inaccuracies in some maps. Some maps
seemed to be missing roads, or they had roads placed
where no roads actually were, or they would be told
to turn onto our river. The app initially had no
transit direction service either. So it was a mess, and
it had a lot of people telling jokes at Apple's expense.

(32:23):
Because of this, users found the experience frustrating and counterproductive.
It prompted a rare apology from Apple as CEO Tim
Cook acknowledged the problems, and then a few heads rolled
over at Apple h Q as a result. Now, I've
got a little bit more to say about two thousand
and twelve, but first let's take another quick break over

(32:51):
at Facebook. The company was barreling towards its initial public offering,
which would make the company a publicly traded entity for
the first time, but the process did not go smoothly.
There were multiple problems with the i p O launch,
from too many shares that were issued to an overvalued
stock price of thirty eight dollars per share. There were

(33:12):
lots of shenanigans going on the day of launch, including
charges that Morgan Stanley, the financial institution that was the
underwriter for the I p O, had influenced stock shares
in a way that was you know, kind of illegal
or at the very least very much frowned upon. Facebook's
stock price took a tumble as a result, singing below

(33:33):
eighteen dollars per share, and giving the company a pretty
sharp blow to the solar plexus as far as its
valuation was concerned. The company has more than recovered in
the years since, however, with stock prices now more than
two hundred bucks per share. That same year, Facebook made
one of its big acquisitions, purchasing the photo sharing app

(33:54):
Instagram for about a billion dollars. However, the plummeting price
of Facebook stocks would actual make that more like seven
forty million dollars at the end. Heaven Systrom and Mike Krieger,
the co founders of Instagram, would stay with Facebook until
two thousand eighteen. After leaving, details would slowly spread as

(34:14):
to why they had departed the company in the first place,
and it was largely because, despite early promises not to
do this, Facebook was frequently lifting features from Instagram to
incorporate in other Facebook services, and would also interfere with
Instagram's operations. So these days there are regulatory agencies that
are looking to separate Instagram from Facebook, breaking up the

(34:37):
company's at whatever happens, Well, I mean, we're gonna have
to wait. It just hasn't happened yet. But they're still
ongoing conversations about breaking up Facebook. We'll talk about that
a little bit more when we get to WhatsApp. That's
that's in the future. Spoiler alert. Nintendo launched the WU
in two thousand twelve. It was an update to the

(34:58):
two thousand six console than into No We, and it
featured a controller called the game Pad, which housed a
tablet touch screen as part of the controller. The control
scheme created new opportunities for gameplay mechanics, but the console
itself was a disappointment in the market. One major problem
was that there were very few titles that actually took
advantage of the innovation, and it left gamers feeling like

(35:20):
they had bought a console with features that no one
was really taking advantage of. The WU would go on
to be one of the bigger disappointments in Nintendo's console history.
As for companies established in two thousand twelve, well, the
one most of you would likely recognize by name is
Oculus VR. The company aimed to bring virtual reality to
the home consumer. More on that later too. All right,

(35:43):
let's move on to two thousand thirteen, and yeah, um,
this is definitely a two parter episode. So on the
bright side, like I said, I'm going to skip all
of two thousand nineteen at the end of the next
one because I just did two episodes about that, so
you know, you have that to look forward to. So
it was two thousand thirteen when a man named Edward
Snowden became a public figure as the former contractor for

(36:05):
the n s A blew the whistle on how the
National Security Agency had been conducting a truly massive data
collection and espionage program on American citizens, largely centered on
phone and computer data transmissions and potentially affecting millions of people.
The n s A denied allegations of wrongdoing and said

(36:26):
that it was operating within the bounds the law. But
then the laws themselves allowed for such secrecy that this
was not much of a comfort. Add to that the
fact that while the agency might be founded on sound principles,
people can still be jerk faces, and you've got a
big problem there, right. There were stories of n s
A employees who are taking advantage of this enormous amount

(36:49):
of data surveillance and using it to look into personal
matters of their own, like to spy on x's and
things like that, nasty stuff. While the n s a story.
Rays have largely died down since two thousand thirteen. Snowden
continues to live in effective exile in Russia. There was
an increase in cybersecurity attacks in two thousand thirteen. There

(37:12):
were targets like Well the retail store target that found
themselves the victims of hacker attacks. Now, I'd love to
say that things have gotten better since then, but every
year we've seen more stories about data breaches, not fewer stories.
Some of these stories are brought on by hackers exploiting vulnerabilities,
and others are the result of dumb mistakes in which

(37:35):
companies accidentally exposed treasure troves of personal information to the
world at large. Two thousand thirteen saw Twitter hold its
own initial public offering, and unlike Facebook's bungled i p O,
the Twitter one went off britty darn well. The company
had not yet proven to be profitable, but still managed
to have a successful I p O and made a

(37:56):
lot of early investors a lot of money. Now, we
first heard about Elon Musk's proposed high speed rail system
called hyperloop back in two thousand thirteen. The idea would
have trains moving through tunnel systems in which most of
the air would get pumped out and that would cut
way down on wind resistance. The rails would connect cities

(38:18):
like San Francisco and Los Angeles, providing an alternative to
a drive that lasts several hours or a short but
environmentally wasteful flight. We're still seeing various companies compete to
bring some variation of Musk's vision to life, and it
remains to be seen if any approach will prove feasible
enough to tackle the incredible challenge associated with building out

(38:41):
new high speed rail infrastructure. You might get all the
technology to fall into place and show that it works
and that it's safe and efficient, but you still have
to build the darn stuff, and that's where I think
we're going to see a lot of issues moving forward. Meanwhile,
Amazon founder and Uber billion their Jeff Bezos announced that

(39:01):
Amazon had long term plans to introduce a delivery service
in which drones would drop off packages. He also spent
some of his considerable wealth to purchase the newspaper The
Washington Post. We started seeing big changes in entertainment in
two thousand and thirteen as Netflix launched its own studio
to create original content. Now these days, that's a given,

(39:23):
but back then it was a pretty big move. Suddenly
a streaming service was actually getting into the business of
making the stuff it was streaming, and it came out
swinging with the series House of Cards, which earned the
service some pretty positive reviews and fourteen Emmy nominations. It
also opened up the opportunity for other services to get

(39:44):
into the production game, leading to our current environment in
which you need to subscribe to a half dozen different
services to see all the various programming available. Welcome to
the new cable age. No. And in the United States,
we saw, you know, a very rough launch of a
very important service in healthcare dot gov. This site was

(40:08):
the first Internet only US national government service, and it
had so many errors and problems at launch that it
helped create a pretty negative overview of the U. S
Government's Affordable Care Act in general. It did, however, start
up a much needed conversation about how to reform the
process by which the US government acquires and implements technology,

(40:31):
because this was not the right way to do it.
It was pretty rotten. Also, in Microsoft unveiled the Xbox one,
the successor to the Xbox three sixty. The initial launch
event didn't go super smoothly, with a general backlash directed
at Microsoft over the fact that the Xbox one was

(40:52):
meant to have a persistent Internet connection, a requirement that
the company would subsequently drop before launch day. Meanwhile, Sony
announced and later launched the PlayStation four, and while Microsoft
had done pretty well against Sony with the Xbox three sixty,
helped in large part by the fact that they had
a year's head start on the PS three, the PS

(41:14):
four would outperform Microsoft's console in the sales department by
a long shot. Also at Microsoft, in two thousand thirteen,
we saw a change in leadership. Steve Balmber announced he
would retire as CEO. Bomber had led the company since
Bill Gates had stepped down as CEO way back in
two thousand and He would actually stay on with Microsoft

(41:35):
until two thousand and fourteen so that they could establish
a new CEO, so this was just him announcing his retirement. Oilver.
At Google, the company killed off it's RSS aggregator service
called Google Reader. I don't know how many of you
remember that. It was really important to me. I loved it,
but it left a lot of dedicaid users like myself upset. However,

(41:56):
other services like Feedley would sweep in to keep RSS
clients relevant. I still use them myself to keep up
with the latest news in various areas, you know, like tech.
We also saw the Pebble debut in two thousand thirteen.
The Kickstarter project was one of the most successful in history,
and it was also an early example of wearable technology.

(42:18):
For a while, like wearables were going to be the
next step beyond smartphones as far as computing is concerned,
we had already seen a major move from traditional computers
to mobile devices by two thousand thirteen. But while numerous
companies have produced various smart watches and activity trackers and
other wearable types of tech, only a few, like Fitbit,

(42:40):
saw any real adoption success, and Pebble's own early victory
wouldn't be enough to sustain the company over the long term.
It would eventually get acquired by Fitbit a couple of
years later and largely dismantled. Two thousand thirteen was also
when the gamer Gate nastiness got started. It began as
a backlash against a game developer named Zoe Quinn, but

(43:02):
it escalated rapidly beyond that. Now ostensibly it was about
game development and ethics and game journalism. But how it
really played out was as a series of campaigns of
harassment aimed at a number of people in and connected
to the games industry, most of them women. There was

(43:23):
no official leadership of this so called movement, but the
coordination of attacks was pretty sophisticated, making extensive use of
online communities like Reddit and four Chan. And you don't
even need that many people to have an effective, uh
campaign of harassment for it to really get to people.
And we saw that happen a lot with gamer Gate.

(43:46):
It was truly awful stuff. In two thousand thirteen, one
company launched that would end up dominating the news cycle
a few years later down the road for all the
wrong reasons. That company was Cambridge Analytics come, a political
consulting firm that was based in the United Kingdom but
would operate around the world. Now. I did episodes about

(44:06):
Cambridge Analytica and the scandal around it and how that
company operated, including how a good deal of its data
on people came from an unethical Facebook survey app that
collected information on users without their consent. The whole story
gets super complicated and super ugly, not just in the
United States, but around the world. The company would eventually

(44:27):
go bankrupt in two thousand eighteen, but many related consulting firms,
some operated by people who worked at Cambridge Analytica, are
still very much an operation to this day. The Cambridge
Analytica scandal is part of what brought Facebook under intense
scrutiny a few years later, and also created suspicion around
the possibility of even holding fair elections in general. So, yeah,

(44:51):
this was a big story and one that had incredibly
powerful consequences. Now, in our next episode, we're gonna take
a look at some of the big stories that unfolded
from two thousand fourteen to two thousand and eighteen. And
if you want to hear about two thousand nineteen, like
I said, just go back a couple of episodes before
this one, because I pretty much covered all of that already.
In the meantime, if you guys have suggestions for future

(45:13):
topics I should cover on tech stuff, reach out to
me on social networks. The place you can do that
with it would be like Facebook or or Twitter. The
handle for both of those is tech stuff hs W.
Just tag me in that and I'll see it, and uh,
I'll talk to you again about the two thousand fourteen
two thousand eighteen really Soon. Tex Stuff is a production

(45:39):
of I heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.