2000-2009: a decade of lost opportunities. An Issue for Everyone!!!

The decade 2000-2009 is coming to a close. And just like with any decade, people try to catch the zeitgeist and define those ten years they’ve lived through. When looking back at the 80’s or 90’s, we must acknowledge that those were amazing decades with plentiful of new technologies that came onto the market almost every month. Probably, some 20 years ago people imagined the '00s as the times when people could fly to different planets and live hand by hand with intelligent robots. But alas, the first decade of the 21^st century appeared to be not that productive in creation of breakthrough technologies that could change our lives completely. 

Some people may refer to the 2000s as the digital age. Really, we feel uneasy without a cell phone or some other gadgets that keep us connected. Our daily life is all about digital stuff that makes our lives much easier. But if we take a closer look at the development of computer and Internet technologies in 2000-2009, we should accept that for these years, companies have achieved stable profits from innovations of the 1980s and 1990s. Even though there are millions of specialists engaged in this field, including computer scientists, marketing experts, engineers and researchers, it seems that nothing revolutionary new has been invented for the past ten years. 

Take for example, CPU manufacturers. They had improved their processors to go faster for many years until the CPUs could go above 4GHz. But the engineering limitations were reached a few years ago and CPU manufacturers had to come up with some new ways to improve processors. Computer scientists failed to break the highest speed of 4 GHz, so increasing the number of cores was the only way to "improve" CPUs. But the point is that two 3 GHz cores do not produce like a 6GHz core. The computer cannot process data from two cores at the same time, so the first data is processed before the other. Besides, the most popular software applications do not require speeds higher than 3 GHz. It means that breakthrough inventions are yet to come in this field. 

The second generation of the Internet, Web 2.0, was introduced in 1999 and it is still used. Web 2.0 sites with interactive facilities became real hits in the 2000's. Web 2.0 worships creative folks – it doesn't really matter whether you're an expert or an amateur, you can write and publish your articles, create your music or movies and, what's more importantly, you can share all this. But the irony is that Web 2.0 is nothing but a piece of jargon. You can hardly find a clear definition of this term and while some people treat Web 2.0 as a movement of creativity and realization, for the others, it's just the improved version of Web 1.0 that continues to use the same concepts and technologies. 

Social networks, Amazon, YouTube, myriads of blogs and powerful Google – these are typical Web 2.0 creations fostering the realization of the self. We read our own thoughts and watch our own movies. Online businesses do their best to meet our needs and even search engines display the advertisements in accordance with our requests rather than display the ads for the products we haven't used yet. Web 2.0 is a narcissist's dream! Users can almost live on the Internet but they can also lose their personal data when buying online.  

Technologies of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s

When looking through the innovations made for the past 30 years, we may see that the technologies of the 2000s are much like those of the 80's and 90's. The only difference is that concepts and technologies of the past decades became mainstream in the 21^st century. 

According to Moore's law, the number of transistors on an integrated circuit is doubled every two years and that's one of the key laws of Silicon Valley. It's true that memory capacity and processing speed increase at exponential rates. While Silicon Valley specialists improve great inventions of the 20^th century, they seem to have no new ideas and concepts in regard to the development of technologies in the 21^st century. So let's hope the next decade will bring new technologies that could make our lives richer and more fulfilling in many ways.