2013 was a lost year for tech
qz.com
qz.com
There's also glimpses of what's going to define the teens, right now it seems like the augmented world might be a big theme. Things like Google Glass, VR like oculus, and maybe the beginning of drones and robots such as googles driverless car. Honestly though, the biggest things are still in labs. They're ideas who's time is tantalizingly close. I'd bet some really big things happened this year, maybe by people a part of this community, but they're not ready for the tech news to hype up or to shit on yet.
Probably the most damning line in the piece. It was indeed a year marked by cryptocurrency mania, NSA scandals, and worst of all, mediocre tech. Anyone think 2014 is going to be any different?
The NSA stuff is concerning, but I get the impression that businesses are working on creating secure and trustless infrastructure.
During bubble times, you get douchebags from MBA-land who come in and, because they generally have superior social polish to real technologists, hog the resources and funding and attention. They make a hash of it, create loads of embarrassment, and slink away after the bubble deflates. Then the real actors get to work for a while... until that generates enough success to draw in the wrong crowd, and the cycle repeats.
Progress is occurring, but there's a shitload of nonsense that can distract one away from seeing it.
Let's hold off on the proclamations about 2013 being a dead year for breakthroughs. It's entirely plausible the biggest breakthrough for 2013 still isn't widely known. Some products require scale before it becomes overly apparent the dramatic impact they're going to have, and or before network effects take hold that said product may require to truly kick into another gear.
The truth about technology is that "breakthroughs" are backed by a long, mostly invisible, period of hard work.
Has it been a "lost year" for technology? No, because millions of people have gone to work, built things, learned stuff, and there's a little more value in the world than there was before. Has it been a terrible year in terms of the high-profile idiocy that occurs, without fail, when the wrong sorts of people get into technology's upper echelons? Absolutely. But that's a cyclical phenomenon and doesn't really make the case for a year that has been completely wasted, any more than winter is a waste of time.