07年IT重大新闻及趋势 苹果头彩 IT裂变
作者： Houston Chronicle
责任编辑： 阚智
来源： 《电脑商情报》
时间： 2007-12-27 08:34
The world of personal technology is always a tumultuous one, but 2007 was a year in which things were really shaken up. Long-standing leaders were challenged. Industries were disrupted. Alliances changed. Groundbreaking products were launched.
The biggest tech stories in 2007 are the kind that will continue to reverberate through 2008 and beyond. To help me come up with a list of the most important ones, I asked the commenters on my blog for suggestions. Together, here are our picks for the tops in tech in 2007.
Apple ascends
When it was near death in the late 1990s, no one could have predicted that Apple would have reached the pinnacle it did in 2007. Apple emerged as the tech industry leader in terms of innovation in the personal computer market, and there are signs it may finally be luring away significant numbers of dissatisfied Windows users. Its midyear release of the iPhone has already starting changing the stodgy cellular phone market - more on that farther down the list.
But is Apple's ascension for real? Its biggest tests will come early in 2008, when its first financial reports indicate whether computer buyers really did choose it over Windows in waves. The company's next test will be how well it manages the release of the second iPhone, particularly in the wake of the dramatic and unexpected price cut on iPhone 1.0, which angered many early buyers. Apple made a lot of dramatic promises in 2007, and it must now keep them in 2008.
Windows woes
Microsoft, the biggest software company in the world, began 2007 with a whimper, rather than the bang it hoped for. Its long-awaited revision of the Windows operating system was greeted with indifference by most tech users.
The company says it has shipped 88 million copies, most of those coming on new PCs, but many users are trying to avoid Vista altogether, even downgrading their systems to Windows XP.The negative buzz has been leveraged by Apple, which is hoping it's enough to make Windows users examine switching to the Mac.
But Microsoft has a chance to redeem Vista with its first service pack, due in the first quarter of 2008. Service packs are usually a signal - particularly to businesses - that it's "safe" to use a new version of Windows. Meanwhile, Microsoft already is working the next release, currently code-named Windows 7, which likely won't roll out until 2010 - at the earliest.
Death of DRM
Slowly but surely, Digital Rights Management is dying. The practice of limiting what users can and can't do with their digital media - music and video - starting decreasing in 2007. First, Apple's Steve Jobs called upon content providers to stop the practice, arguing customers were becoming frustrated with their inability to use content on any device. Sales of DRM-shackled media began to flatten.
Content providers began responding, experimenting with DRM-free offerings.
More and more music is being sold in unrestricted digital formats - often as standard MP3 files - on mainstream sites, including iTunes and AmazonMP3.com.
Deutsche Grammaphone recently opened a store populated solely with unrestricted classical music.
Major artists such as Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead broke from their labels and began distributing music online. Look for these floodgates to open much wider in 2008.
Wireless disruption
The cell phone business, which had been stagnating in terms of innovation and customer freedom, got a major wakeup call in 2007, courtesy of Apple and Google. Although it was released only six months ago, Apple's iPhone has already made waves in the mobile-phone industry, with several companies offering knockoffs. Customers began hacking their iPhones, unlocking them to run on other networks, bringing to light a market for phones that run on any network.
And Google late in the year announced an initiative, in partnership with several mobile phone companies, to create a phone with an open-source operating system called Android that would dramatically extend the cell phone's capabilities. These phones would not be tied to any one network, further providing customers with more choices. The Android phones, due out in 2008, will further shake up the market. And iPhone 2.0 will be out as well.
Music Tracks Get Cheaper and Finally Go Free
By all accounts it was a good year for music fans--especially cheapskates. The year in digital music started off promisingly when iTunes began dropping copy protection from many of the songs in its catalog.
Also in 2007, iTunes drew some serious competition in the digital download arena, with , Sprint, and others selling digital downloads--sans the requirement by Apple to use its iTunes software.
Skinflints, who rejoiced when from $1.29 to $.99, got even better news when Radiohead and other for record albums and began selling music directly to fans though their own Web sites.
Web Radio Sour Notes
While Web video blossomed in 2007, Web radio encountered some turbulence. For several weeks last summer, small Webcasters were on the verge of shutting down after the XCopyright Royalty Board imposed steep new royalty fees that had been requested by SoundExchange, the performance rights organization responsible for collecting and distributing royalties for digital transmission of music. Because the fees were based on "performances"--which on the Internet translates into the number of custom channels that the user maintains, rather than into the revenue that results from use--they would have bankrupted most Internet broadcasters.
In August, large Webcasters reached an agreement with SoundExchange to allow them to continue operating The deal established a $50,000 cap on royalty fees for large Webcasters that may stream thousands of channels (the CRB's per-channel minimum of $500 would have far exceeded the cap for major Internet radio sites). SoundExchange also offered smaller Webcasters the option of paying royalties based on their revenue rather than on their number of channels, provided that the revenue from the site involved did not exceed $1.2 million a year.
The future of Internet radio is by no means settled yet. Webcasters continue to appeal the CRB's ruling in the courts, and Congress may intervene with legislation specifically designed for Internet radio.
You need a lot of bandwidth to download and stream TV shows and music over the Internet, which is why many ISPs began to doubt whether allowing customers to use unlimited amounts of bandwidth was a wise business strategy.
In 2007 Comcast decided to act, booting some customers who violated the ISP's acceptable-use policy, which allows Comcast to cut off service to customers who "download too much" off the Internet. In other cases, Comcast dealt with customers who used specific, bandwidth-intensive applications such as peer-to-peer file-sharing programs .
Meanwhile, some telephone and cable companies expressed grave concern over by forbidding ISPs to prioritize packets based on where the packets came from (or based on how much the senders or recipients were paying).
Storage products (hard disk and optical) achieved important milestones in 2007. In January, Hitachi shipped the industry's ; to attain its huge capacity, this model incorporated five disk platters.
Other entries in the terabyte club soon appeared. Seagate announced its Barracuda 7200.11 in June, and then Western Digital joined the 1TB fraternity with its .
As hard drives broke the terabyte barrier, an optical storage war went from cold to hot. A hit the market in two rival formats: Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD. Consumers didn't know which one to buy--though they snapped up 90,000 HD DVD players in November, when Wal-Mart and other retailers sold off old stock of Toshiba's HD-A2 at a new low price of $100.
Rival backers of the two formats tried to entice customers with price drops and free movie deals. But as 2008 arrives, it is still anyone's guess as to which format will prevail.
On the gaming front this year, went head-to-head against a couple of more-powerful rivals, the Sony PS3 and Microsoft Xbox 360, and surprised many observers by . Unfortunately for Nintendo, many would-be buyers were frustrated by the short supply of Wii units.
While fans of the Wii searched for game consoles, . Nearly 1 million people preordered the latest installment in Microsoft's hit Halo series, and retailers reportedly collected of the game's market debut.
In 2007, Asus released , Intel introduced , and the One Laptop Per Child project unveiled . Though these laptops were , they attracted lots of interest from the gadget set.
The XO laptop was plagued by , , and unexpected competition from Asus and Intel. As a result, OLPC organizers decided to let interested consumers in the United States and Canada buy an XO laptop for $200--as long as they paid another $200 for a second unit to be given away to a child in the developing world.
Google's Growth Spurts
Google continued its rapid expansion in 2007. Besides rolling out the , it spent much of the year readying a bid for the , which is likely to be hotly contested. At the auction, the FCC will sell off licenses to frequencies that will become available when analog TV stations go off the air, making way for the new digital TV system.
Not content with turning the wireless market on its head, Google also announced a host of services in well-established product categories. For example, the company launched the OpenSocial application platform for social network services, and Knol, a competitor to Wikipedia. What's next, a Google automobile?
My personal favorite Google newcomer of 2007 was . Some people, however, insist that .
In a year when Al Gore and the U.N. Panel on Climate Change won a Nobel Peace Prize for its work to raise awareness about global warming, tech firms decided that green was the new black when it came to being good corporate citizens.
Dell, Google, HP, Intel, Lenovo, and even an MP3 maker called NHC went green in 2007. Google set out to decrease dependency on coal with its , which pledges to invest "tens of millions" of research and development dollars in successful efforts to produce 1 gigawatt of renewable energy more cheaply than can be done using coal.
Meanwhile, Intel and 40 other organizations created the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, whose mandate is to increase the energy efficiency of computer and server equipment.
Let's hope that 2007 marked the high tide for hackers and that 2008 will produce a downturn in their fortunes. Yeah, just call me Pollyanna.
Data thieves and botnet czars dispensed plenty of misery in 2007. Among other things, the year witnessed one of the largest digital data thefts ever: Hackers of an estimated 45.6 to 94 million customers of department store owner TJX. The hackers gained access to TJX's computer systems by eavesdropping on the department stores' poorly protected Wi-Fi networks. The breach prompted numerous calls for stronger data-protection laws.
Also in 2007, things went from bad to worse for . In January, the Storm Worm emerged; it went on to become 2007's biggest PC security threat. The name "Storm Worm" is a bit of a misnomer because the malware is actually bot software that --a network that executes commands issued by a central criminal controller.
Law enforcement agencies . But security experts warn that for every individual arrested for running a botnet, a dozen more likely remain at large.
If 2007 is any indicator of what the tech world has in store for us in 2008, here are a few words of advice: Keep your virus definitions up-to-date, start saving for cool new gear (some of which we expect to see at the Consumer Electronics Show in early January), and consider waiting until Vista SP2 (or until you buy a new PC) before upgrading from XP.
The biggest tech stories in 2007 are the kind that will continue to reverberate through 2008 and beyond. To help me come up with a list of the most important ones, I asked the commenters on my blog for suggestions. Together, here are our picks for the tops in tech in 2007.
Apple ascends
When it was near death in the late 1990s, no one could have predicted that Apple would have reached the pinnacle it did in 2007. Apple emerged as the tech industry leader in terms of innovation in the personal computer market, and there are signs it may finally be luring away significant numbers of dissatisfied Windows users. Its midyear release of the iPhone has already starting changing the stodgy cellular phone market - more on that farther down the list.
But is Apple's ascension for real? Its biggest tests will come early in 2008, when its first financial reports indicate whether computer buyers really did choose it over Windows in waves. The company's next test will be how well it manages the release of the second iPhone, particularly in the wake of the dramatic and unexpected price cut on iPhone 1.0, which angered many early buyers. Apple made a lot of dramatic promises in 2007, and it must now keep them in 2008.
Windows woes
Microsoft, the biggest software company in the world, began 2007 with a whimper, rather than the bang it hoped for. Its long-awaited revision of the Windows operating system was greeted with indifference by most tech users.
The company says it has shipped 88 million copies, most of those coming on new PCs, but many users are trying to avoid Vista altogether, even downgrading their systems to Windows XP.The negative buzz has been leveraged by Apple, which is hoping it's enough to make Windows users examine switching to the Mac.
But Microsoft has a chance to redeem Vista with its first service pack, due in the first quarter of 2008. Service packs are usually a signal - particularly to businesses - that it's "safe" to use a new version of Windows. Meanwhile, Microsoft already is working the next release, currently code-named Windows 7, which likely won't roll out until 2010 - at the earliest.
Death of DRM
Slowly but surely, Digital Rights Management is dying. The practice of limiting what users can and can't do with their digital media - music and video - starting decreasing in 2007. First, Apple's Steve Jobs called upon content providers to stop the practice, arguing customers were becoming frustrated with their inability to use content on any device. Sales of DRM-shackled media began to flatten.
Content providers began responding, experimenting with DRM-free offerings.
More and more music is being sold in unrestricted digital formats - often as standard MP3 files - on mainstream sites, including iTunes and AmazonMP3.com.
Deutsche Grammaphone recently opened a store populated solely with unrestricted classical music.
Major artists such as Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead broke from their labels and began distributing music online. Look for these floodgates to open much wider in 2008.
Wireless disruption
The cell phone business, which had been stagnating in terms of innovation and customer freedom, got a major wakeup call in 2007, courtesy of Apple and Google. Although it was released only six months ago, Apple's iPhone has already made waves in the mobile-phone industry, with several companies offering knockoffs. Customers began hacking their iPhones, unlocking them to run on other networks, bringing to light a market for phones that run on any network.
And Google late in the year announced an initiative, in partnership with several mobile phone companies, to create a phone with an open-source operating system called Android that would dramatically extend the cell phone's capabilities. These phones would not be tied to any one network, further providing customers with more choices. The Android phones, due out in 2008, will further shake up the market. And iPhone 2.0 will be out as well.
Music Tracks Get Cheaper and Finally Go Free
By all accounts it was a good year for music fans--especially cheapskates. The year in digital music started off promisingly when iTunes began dropping copy protection from many of the songs in its catalog.
Also in 2007, iTunes drew some serious competition in the digital download arena, with , Sprint, and others selling digital downloads--sans the requirement by Apple to use its iTunes software.
Skinflints, who rejoiced when from $1.29 to $.99, got even better news when Radiohead and other for record albums and began selling music directly to fans though their own Web sites.
Web Radio Sour Notes
While Web video blossomed in 2007, Web radio encountered some turbulence. For several weeks last summer, small Webcasters were on the verge of shutting down after the XCopyright Royalty Board imposed steep new royalty fees that had been requested by SoundExchange, the performance rights organization responsible for collecting and distributing royalties for digital transmission of music. Because the fees were based on "performances"--which on the Internet translates into the number of custom channels that the user maintains, rather than into the revenue that results from use--they would have bankrupted most Internet broadcasters.
In August, large Webcasters reached an agreement with SoundExchange to allow them to continue operating The deal established a $50,000 cap on royalty fees for large Webcasters that may stream thousands of channels (the CRB's per-channel minimum of $500 would have far exceeded the cap for major Internet radio sites). SoundExchange also offered smaller Webcasters the option of paying royalties based on their revenue rather than on their number of channels, provided that the revenue from the site involved did not exceed $1.2 million a year.
The future of Internet radio is by no means settled yet. Webcasters continue to appeal the CRB's ruling in the courts, and Congress may intervene with legislation specifically designed for Internet radio.
You need a lot of bandwidth to download and stream TV shows and music over the Internet, which is why many ISPs began to doubt whether allowing customers to use unlimited amounts of bandwidth was a wise business strategy.
In 2007 Comcast decided to act, booting some customers who violated the ISP's acceptable-use policy, which allows Comcast to cut off service to customers who "download too much" off the Internet. In other cases, Comcast dealt with customers who used specific, bandwidth-intensive applications such as peer-to-peer file-sharing programs .
Meanwhile, some telephone and cable companies expressed grave concern over by forbidding ISPs to prioritize packets based on where the packets came from (or based on how much the senders or recipients were paying).
Storage products (hard disk and optical) achieved important milestones in 2007. In January, Hitachi shipped the industry's ; to attain its huge capacity, this model incorporated five disk platters.
Other entries in the terabyte club soon appeared. Seagate announced its Barracuda 7200.11 in June, and then Western Digital joined the 1TB fraternity with its .
As hard drives broke the terabyte barrier, an optical storage war went from cold to hot. A hit the market in two rival formats: Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD. Consumers didn't know which one to buy--though they snapped up 90,000 HD DVD players in November, when Wal-Mart and other retailers sold off old stock of Toshiba's HD-A2 at a new low price of $100.
Rival backers of the two formats tried to entice customers with price drops and free movie deals. But as 2008 arrives, it is still anyone's guess as to which format will prevail.
On the gaming front this year, went head-to-head against a couple of more-powerful rivals, the Sony PS3 and Microsoft Xbox 360, and surprised many observers by . Unfortunately for Nintendo, many would-be buyers were frustrated by the short supply of Wii units.
While fans of the Wii searched for game consoles, . Nearly 1 million people preordered the latest installment in Microsoft's hit Halo series, and retailers reportedly collected of the game's market debut.
In 2007, Asus released , Intel introduced , and the One Laptop Per Child project unveiled . Though these laptops were , they attracted lots of interest from the gadget set.
The XO laptop was plagued by , , and unexpected competition from Asus and Intel. As a result, OLPC organizers decided to let interested consumers in the United States and Canada buy an XO laptop for $200--as long as they paid another $200 for a second unit to be given away to a child in the developing world.
Google's Growth Spurts
Google continued its rapid expansion in 2007. Besides rolling out the , it spent much of the year readying a bid for the , which is likely to be hotly contested. At the auction, the FCC will sell off licenses to frequencies that will become available when analog TV stations go off the air, making way for the new digital TV system.
Not content with turning the wireless market on its head, Google also announced a host of services in well-established product categories. For example, the company launched the OpenSocial application platform for social network services, and Knol, a competitor to Wikipedia. What's next, a Google automobile?
My personal favorite Google newcomer of 2007 was . Some people, however, insist that .
In a year when Al Gore and the U.N. Panel on Climate Change won a Nobel Peace Prize for its work to raise awareness about global warming, tech firms decided that green was the new black when it came to being good corporate citizens.
Dell, Google, HP, Intel, Lenovo, and even an MP3 maker called NHC went green in 2007. Google set out to decrease dependency on coal with its , which pledges to invest "tens of millions" of research and development dollars in successful efforts to produce 1 gigawatt of renewable energy more cheaply than can be done using coal.
Meanwhile, Intel and 40 other organizations created the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, whose mandate is to increase the energy efficiency of computer and server equipment.
Let's hope that 2007 marked the high tide for hackers and that 2008 will produce a downturn in their fortunes. Yeah, just call me Pollyanna.
Data thieves and botnet czars dispensed plenty of misery in 2007. Among other things, the year witnessed one of the largest digital data thefts ever: Hackers of an estimated 45.6 to 94 million customers of department store owner TJX. The hackers gained access to TJX's computer systems by eavesdropping on the department stores' poorly protected Wi-Fi networks. The breach prompted numerous calls for stronger data-protection laws.
Also in 2007, things went from bad to worse for . In January, the Storm Worm emerged; it went on to become 2007's biggest PC security threat. The name "Storm Worm" is a bit of a misnomer because the malware is actually bot software that --a network that executes commands issued by a central criminal controller.
Law enforcement agencies . But security experts warn that for every individual arrested for running a botnet, a dozen more likely remain at large.
If 2007 is any indicator of what the tech world has in store for us in 2008, here are a few words of advice: Keep your virus definitions up-to-date, start saving for cool new gear (some of which we expect to see at the Consumer Electronics Show in early January), and consider waiting until Vista SP2 (or until you buy a new PC) before upgrading from XP.
