A Decade In Review (But Only 2009 to 2013)

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 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 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. 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 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 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.

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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.

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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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, 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.

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. 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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,

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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.

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, 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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

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.