25 Technologies That Changed the Decade

By eWEEK Labs  |  Posted 2010-02-11

25 Technologies That Changed the Decade

By most measures, the last 10 years were not the best of times. Terrorism, natural disasters and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression have left many people happy to see the decade go away. In fact, given the many bad things that did happen, those who use the moniker "the Uh Ohs" to define the decade probably have it about right.

But when it comes to technology, the last 10 years were actually a very good time for innovation and progress. During the last 10 years we've seen very significant advances, especially in the areas of mobile devices and the ability to use the Web as a computing platform.

For example, if you compare a modern smartphone with a late-'90s cell phone, it seems as if a lot more than 10 or so years separate the two devices. Look at the static and uninteractive Web of 10 years ago, and then look at a modern AJAX- and social network-enabled Website. It's amazing we were able to do anything on the old Web. And across the tech spectrum, as devices have become more powerful and more useful, they've also become less expensive and more accessible.

In this special report, eWEEK Labs has put together a list of the 25 most significant technologies and products of the last decade-those that changed the way we work, play and live. Some of these products and technologies set the stage for the cutting-edge tech we use today, while others are the cutting-edge tech we use today.

Following are our picks for the top 25, in alphabetical order.

Nos. 1 to 5

1. 3G broadband


2. 802.11g



It seemed simple at first-just a set of scripts and standards technologies that were already around for building Web applications. But the mix of technologies that make up AJAX launched a Web revolution, making it possible to build attractive and interactive Web-based GUIs that didn't require extra plug-ins or extensions and that worked well in most modern Web browsers.

4. Amazon EC2

Probably the first real iteration of a cloud-computing platform, Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud is still one of the most popular. Making it simple for anyone to throw a virtual server machine onto Amazon.com's powerful server platform, EC2 changed what it meant to own a server or even run a business: A large number of new businesses don't even own server hardware-their entire operations run on EC2.

5. AMD64

At the beginning of the decade, general-purpose 64-bit computing wasn't looking promising. Intel's Itanium architecture was proving difficult to implement and was generally seen as a disappointment. Instead of taking Intel's rewrite approach, Advanced Micro Devices built its 64-bit platform on existing processor technology, and pushed 64-bit processors into the mainstream.

Nos. 6 to 10

6. BlackBerry


7. Blade servers


8. Bluetooth


9. Firefox


10. Gmail/Google Apps


Nos. 11 to 15

11. iPhone/iPod


12. Mac OS X


13. Multicore processors


14. Netbooks


15. Openoffice.org


Nos. 16 to 20


16. POE


17. Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Coming into the decade, Linux was already a hot commodity, but it wasn't until Red Hat launched the buttoned-down and subscription-priced Enterprise variant of its Linux distribution that Linux was truly ready-both in terms of road map stability and of business model-to truly storm the enterprise. 

18. Salesforce.com

Rising from the ashes of the failed ASP (application service provider) market of the late 1990s, Salesforce.com proved that companies would run vital enterprise business applications-even CRM and sales force automation-over the Web.

19. Social networks


20. Solaris 10

During the latter half of '00s, Sun Microsystems' Solaris 10 sat at the leading edge of operating system technologies, with unique capabilities that include Containers virtualization, Dtrace system instrumentation and the ZFS file system. Solaris 10 also helped put a stamp of inevitability on the x86-64 architecture and on the open-source-as-a-platform licensing strategy.

Nos. 21 to 25


21. Treo

Looking at it today, the Treo may seem like just another smartphone. But the early Treo set the stage for and was very influential in the development of modern smartphones. Any phone today that isn't an iPhone or a new phone directly influenced by the iPhone owes a huge debt to the Treo (and even the iPhone is influenced by the Treo).

22. Twitter


23. VMware


24. VOIP, Skype, SIP


25. Windows XP

With all of the recent hype about Windows 7-and the bad experiences that nearly every user has had at one time or another with Windows XP-it might seem strange to see Windows Vista's predecessor on any top tech list. But XP is certainly the most dominant operating system of the decade. And when Vista proved to be a disappointment, a majority of users and businesses were happy to stick with XP (and many still are).

What did we miss? What's on the list that shouldn't be? Let Labs Managing Editor Jason Brooks know at jbrooks@eweek.com.

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