11 moments that made the decade

Things can change in 10 years, and they changed. World events and technology are changing at rapid pace. The individual stories of the last decade consolidate into a few big trends. Always political, technology became partisan and started to splinter. If you want to understand how this got here, these moments are a good place to start.

Google leaves China — US tech companies have had a hard time dealing with China lately, caught between the draw of a billion new users and the threat of omnipresent surveillance and censorship. Google has been operating in China since 2000, making significant censorship concessions to the government, but thinking that a searchable internet would force China to open up in the years that followed.

It didn’t work. After a targeted cyber-attack and mounting criticism from human rights groups, Google finally gave up the ghost in January 2010, removing the censorship blocks mandated by the Chinese government and getting blocked by party censors almost immediately. It was a watershed moment for Google and an early acknowledgment that better information services don’t always change the world.

The launch of iPhone 4 — The rise of the smartphone really started with the iPhone 4 in 2010. The iPhone 4 had an all-time great Apple design, introduced a high-resolution display and selfie camera, and showed us that rear cameras on smartphones could be worth using.

More important than all that; several months after launch, it became the first iPhone to be available across all major US carriers. The iPhone 4 showed the world what a flagship phone should look like. And even if today’s phones are a whole lot bigger and faster, they’re still made in the model of 2010’s finest phone.

Death of Steve Jobs — Steve Jobs death hit the industry like a cataclysm. Within Apple, the loss seemed unthinkable. Jobs embodied all of Apple’s best and worst qualities: its perfectionism, its self-satisfaction, its willingness to overturn whole industries when a better path presented itself. It wasn’t clear how far those qualities could extend beyond the man himself.

Looking back, Apple has only gotten more ambitious, expanding into television, personal assistants, and health monitoring. Tim Cook has been a success by any plausible metric, but his tenure will always be thought of as the post-Jobs era, and Jobs’ spirit still looms over the company like an unfulfilled promise.

The launch of Tinder — I didn’t have the ability to swipe left or right on thousands of people from the comfort of my bed on a winter night? Tinder launched in 2012, and it ushered in the decade of the swipe. At the same time, it changed online dating and alarmed some people into believing that we’d all become corrupted, terrible people.

Tinder set a new standard for what we wanted from those apps. The complicated questionnaires were gone, along with the intricate profiles and messaging systems. Instead, you got a long line of faces and a single binary choice; swipe left or swipe right. Whether it’s for better or worse, how people meet and date will never be the same.

Edward Snowden reveals the NSA’s PRISM project — Classified documents showed an ongoing National Security Agency program to steal data from the biggest tech companies in the world, code-named “PRISM.” Diagrams showed direct access to databases at Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, between them, touched just about everyone on the internet. The industry scrambled to show that they knew nothing about the program, and later leaks seemed to suggest that the NSA had actively hacked into internal networks to secure the data, but the loss of trust was permanent. After PRISM, it was hard to believe that private data could really be private in the cloud.

Facebook buys WhatsApp — This was the game changing moment in personal people to people conversation and messaging space. Facebook already owns Instagram and buying WhatsApp cemented its position as the biggest social network in world. Facebook acquire WhatsApp, a rapidly growing cross-platform mobile messaging company, for a total of approximately $16 billion, including $4 billion in cash and approximately $12 billion worth of Facebook shares.

The acquisition supports Facebook and WhatsApp’s shared mission to bring more connectivity and utility to the world by delivering core internet services efficiently and affordably. The combination will help accelerate growth and user engagement across both companies.

SpaceX lands a rocket — After space agencies had deployed their satellites, rockets didn’t have an easy way of getting home, so they mostly fell back to Earth, never to be recovered. With SpaceX, Elon Musk wanted to change that, programming each rocket to relight its engines on the way back down, lowering itself gently down onto a concrete landing pad or autonomous drone ship.

But as complicated as that sounds, making it work was even harder. In the first few tries, the rockets simply exploded on impact. It wasn’t clear how long that string of crash landings would go on, but SpaceX finally stuck its first landing on December 21st, 2015, with the company’s Falcon 9 rocket gently touching down on a concrete pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The novelty trick would soon become routine. SpaceX has since landed a total of 46 boosters, with RUDs becoming a rarity.

Donald Trump is elected president of the United States — This is the biggest change in world politics for past decade. Trump is the fifth person in U.S. history to become president while losing the nationwide popular vote. He is the first president with neither prior public service nor military experience, and the oldest person to be inaugurated for a first presidential term.

Trump emerged as his party’s front-runner amidst a wide field of Republican primary candidates, while Clinton defeated Senator Bernie Sanders and became the first female presidential nominee of a major American party. Trump’s populist, nationalist campaign, which promised to “Make America Great Again” and opposed political correctness, illegal immigration, and many free-trade agreements,garnered extensive free media coverage.Clinton emphasized her extensive political experience, denounced Trump and many of his supporters as bigots, and advocated the expansion of President Obama’s policies; racial, LGBT, and women’s rights; and “inclusive capitalism”.The tone of the general election campaign was widely characterized as divisive and negative.Trump faced controversy over his views on race and immigration, incidents of violence against protesters at his rallies, and numerous sexual misconduct allegations including a controversial tape, while Clinton’s campaign was undermined by declining approval ratings due to concerns about her ethics and trustworthiness, and an FBI investigation of her improper use of a private email server, which received more media coverage than any other topic during the campaign.

Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal — Facebook was probably not expecting people all over the globe suddenly care about data privacy. But that’s exactly what happened when The Guardian broke a story about a shady consulting firm Cambridge Analytica harvesting data from millions of unsuspecting Facebook users. The firm exploited a loophole in Facebook’s API to target Facebook users and their friends with a quiz, designed to help the Trump campaign reach potential voters more effectively.

Facebook’s reputation did not survive the fallout. Dozens of privacy scandals followed as companies seemed constitutionally incapable of keeping data locked down. It was the beginning of a reckoning for Facebook and the industry at large, which set to work refactoring its APIs and rethinking how it handles consumer data in general.

The Camp Fire rages through California — The deadliest and most destructive fire in California history in 2018, burning through 18,804 structures and killing 85 people. Wildfires have a long history in California, but their scale and devastation have gotten worse with climate change. The Camp Fire arrived in the middle of the longest drought in California’s history. After Pacific Gas and Electric was blamed for its power lines sparking the Camp Fire, utilities rolled out massive preemptive blackouts that could become more frequent in the future.

It’s hard to pin down a single cause for the new surge of activism, but extreme events like the Camp Fire are a big part of it — one more way climate change slapped us in the face this decade and forced us to pay attention.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin leave Google — Larry Page and Sergey Brin had been largely out of the loop since Google restructured into Alphabet in 2015. The non-Google Alphabet projects had largely flamed out, and the meaningful business decisions were already left to Sundar Pichai. In some ways, it felt like the departure was an official recognition of something that had been true for years.

The two men were closely tied to Andy Rubin’s sexual harassment payoff, which spurred the largest employee walkout in industry history, and they had left Pichai with a maddening set of problems. There was internal strife over government contracts, the daily battle of moderating the world’s biggest video platform, and a simmering feud with the Republican Party and Donald Trump. Pichai would need lots of help and luck getting through it, and Page and Brin would only be a distraction. It was time to get serious.

It was an anticlimactic note for the end of the decade but an important lesson. Google has grown up, like the rest of the industry, and it needs a wise caretaker more than a boy genius. As we head into 2020, those caretakers are in short supply.

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Ajay is a thinker, believer & above all, a human with heart. He is a tech enthusiastic & loves to share knowledge. He is passionate about constant improvements.

Visit his Medium home page to read more insights from him.

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