14 DAY TRIAL // By all means, at the end of the year a roundup of all the important events that took place in the previous 12 months is mandatory, and this past year has been giving us a world of firsts, surprises both good and bad which brought together companies that have never collaborated before.
Just in case you were wondering what exactly the highlights of this past year from the IT perspective were, a short leap through time should be useful. We're not trying to establish any rankings, as the real results of all the premieres announced in 2005 should be discussed only after the financial results of this year will be published by all the producers that stood out in this period.
The browser market finally came back to life after being completely under Internet Explorer's spell for so long. Actually we can't say that era is passed us now, since IE is still top dog, but Firefox made waves throughout the year and is perceived as a safer and much more complex tool than Microsoft's offering. Opera managed to make a comeback in 2005 even if it still has only little over one percent share in the browser market, but from the mobile standpoint, the Finnish application is gaining rapidly more and more fans, especially since the Opera Mini application became available. Users of Java-capable cell phones anywhere may find browsing the Web easier and cheaper now that Opera Software is allowing anyone to download its Opera Mini application. As for Firefox, it kept shattering records throughout the year and became the favorite browsing tool for millions of users at a very rapid pace. This lead to Internet Explorer's market share dropping below the 90% quota for the first time in years, while the Robin Hood of the open source community managed to break the 50 million downloads record in April, which meant that only a few months after being launched, the browser had 8,69 percent of the market. For its first anniversary, Firefox prepared the open source community an impressive surprise as it announced surpassing 100 million downloaded copies. Considering the Mozilla website isn't the only source to download the application, the number of users was much greater than that and it definitely marked an alarm signal for Microsoft. Opera decided that in order to get closer to the competition it was time to give up on the pay-per-use policy and starting last January it decided to give up on trying to charge universities for its browser and handed out site licenses for free. This strategy - to give youth a taste for free - is a decent idea. Opera's tools such as mouse gestures and sophisticated session savers proved to be quite addictive to numerous users. Later on, in September to be more exact, Opera published the free version of the application, called Opera 8.5, which didn't include a banner displaying advertisements.
The Internet Explorer story didn't go so well this year as it mostly surfaced related to bugs and viruses, while no real updates were made available to the public. The much awaited version 7 of the browser is still undergoing tests and should be ready early next year. A short recap of the rumors that circulated this year about the newest version of the Internet explorer: first, the browser was set to be released only for Windows XP, but later on it was decided to be compatible also with Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows XP SP2. Then, early June, Rob Franco, lead program manager for IE Security at Microsoft, confirmed in a blog entry that "low-rights" mode in Internet Explorer 7 will be for Longhorn only. This was supposed to bring IE a better security system, which could have ended so many of the browser's problems. The much awaited browser slowly progressed towards including its own antivirus, project which reached a great level of complexity. The antivirus was supposed to be developed by the Sybari Software, company which was acquired by Microsoft earlier this year. Besides this vital tool for a faulty browser, the Internet Explorer 7 was announced to include also tools to prevent phishing attacks. End of October, Microsoft also announced that Internet Explorer 7 will include changes like disabling of the SSLv2 protocol by default in favor of the stronger-encryption available through TSLv1. Also, when dealing with secure sites whose certificates are not valid, IE7 by default will err on the side of caution and block access much like Windows XP Service Pack 2 already does. Still, to this day, all of these announcements remain to pass many tests and users will be able to give a verdict only when the final version of IE 7 will be available.
2005 was the year that blogs (web logs), online journals written by Internet users all over the world, really kicked in, and the border between real journalists and amateurs posing as special correspondents, witnesses to important events, became little more than a very fine line. Blogs also have gained more credibility as they have broken news missed by the mainstream media and provided firsthand accounts of the war in Iraq and the tsunami that killed thousands in Asia. The usefulness of such blogs was shown when the Indian Ocean tsunami struck last year and some of the early accounts and pictures came from bloggers. The exact opposite of such a useful purpose happened at the end of 2005, when Wikipedia came into the spotlight with a rather negative input when the former publisher of the Tennessean newspaper and founding editorial director of USA Today revealed that a Wikipedia entry that ran for four months had incorrectly named him as a longtime suspect in the assassinations of president John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert.
On the online scenery, there's really no going around the iTunes subject as it completely dominated the business and even became synonymous with the concept of legal online music services. The secret recipe Apple used to ensure iTunes' success relies on the iPod, the music player which basically needs no introduction and which is being sold like crazy around the world. Unfortunately, not all that wears the iTunes label is destined to reach the same success and the best example to prove that is the Motorola ROKR phone which was a major disappointment. This, however, didn't hurt iTunes reputation in any way and the service managed to establish a new record, when in only three weeks after the video download service became available there had been already sold over one million videos.
From the open source perspective, other than the Mozilla Foundation rattle about the all-in-wonder Firefox and the Thunderbird email client, we could mention this little matter of having IBM and Red Hat join forces to persuade consumers to migrate from Solaris to Linux, project which started sometime last May. The companies were offering free "migration assessment" to evaluate whether a user would be able to make the switch to Linux. If the user went ahead with the switch, IBM was set to offer Migration Factory Services for a fee. In June, the Oasis Consortium approved the OpenDocument standards, a free open source format, with no requirement to pay royalties, based upon the XML-based file format originally created by OpenOffice.org. The format is designed for saving and exchanging editable office documents such as text documents (including memos, reports, and books), spreadsheets, charts, and presentations. Towards the end of the year, Sun also proved it was interested in helping out the open source community and it announced it will bundle much of its software and provide it free to customers, the latest tweak by the computer maker to its business model in an effort to return to growth. Sun said that its Java Enterprise System, Sun N1 management software and developer tools will be available for free.
Telephony-wise, the year 2005 meant the expansion of 3G services throughout most of the civilized world, but also confirmed what experts predicted even from the end of 2004, that Voice over IP will be looked at as a real alternative to the classical telephony. And why shouldn't it be successful considering it is cheaper, it offers better sound quality and there are already a great number of free applications which support it for free? The best example of a successful VoIP tool is obviously Skype, a tool which has been downloaded by more than 70 million users and has also been recently selected by the Mandriva Linux distributor to be the default VoIP tool include in the next edition of the operating system. Skype has also caught the attention of online marketplace eBay, and has been acquired by it this autumn. Skype provides services such as PC-to-PC, PC-to-landline and PC-to-mobile phone calling.
Google has been really putting on a service party this year, offering so many new features that basically at least every other day the media discussed another Google premiere. The competition was most of the time left in the dust, and even without Google launching a VoIP service, the online search engine succeeded in dominating the search business. It also raised the bar when it upgraded the Gmail inboxes to 2 GB and the available space is rising continuously. Another successful service launched by Google was the vlogging (video-blogging) service, which is basically a blog (short for weblog) which uses video as the primary content. The video is linked within a videoblog post and usually accompanied by supporting text, image, and additional meta data to provide context. Probably one of the most successful Google services to be launched this year was the Satellite for Google Maps service. In May, Google announced it was planning to improve online news searches. A patent filed in the US will allow stories to be ranked according to their quality, rather than just by relevance. The patent would create a system to compare the track record and credibility of different news sources, New Scientist magazine has reported. The database would weigh up a series of variables, including story length, number of staff employed and amount of traffic to its website.
Of course, this article is only trying to sum up the most important IT events of the year, from the services and software solutions perspective. As for those applications which have only been unveiled as betas, the best thing to do before giving a verdict is to wait for the final version, even if that means to wait another year. Until then, Happy Holidays!