Winners and Duds of the Millennium
By John C. Dvorak, ZDNet
Dec 27, 1999

As we head into the third millennium, everyone is obsessed with looking back at the second one. Of course, no one really cares about successes and failures from 1000 to 1900 any more; most top ten lists of this and that focus on our century. I suspect many important inventions of earlier times, such as the all-important invention of corrugated cardboard in the 1870s, will be ignored by most list makers in favor of something like Visual Basic. Scotch tape will probably be ignored, too.

In fact, most of the retrospectives I've seen favor events and inventions that today's 17-year-olds still have fresh in their minds. Listen to the pundits, and you'd think the world began when the Web arrived. Go, Internet!

Since I am part of the grand media conspiracy, I'll narrow my retrospective of the past 1,000 years down to the past year and reduce it further to focus only on computer technology. What are some of the biggest events and some of the biggest duds of the past year? Here are my choices. (And I invite you to add your opinions at the end. I'll plow through them all and try to put together a definitive list.)

The Top Five Biggest Events of the Past 1,000 Years (or maybe just 1999)

1. Microsoft is officially declared a monopoly. How can people ignore this event? Which leads me to ask Time magazine's editors: When will Bill Gates be Person of the Year? It's an outrage that he was passed over this year in favor of an online bookseller who has never turned a profit.

2. The return of Apple Computer. Steve Jobs was also a worthy Person of the Year nominee because of the masterful turnaround he pulled off at Apple. It was big news. Downside: Now we have to live with Steve Jobs again.

3. E-commerce shows no signs of stopping. The big Christmas season for online stores and the continued growth of the Web is a huge story, and it will continue to be a huge story until the growth rates finally stabilize and people see beyond the hype to the true potential of the Internet.

4. Linux. Lots of talk. Lots of hype. Lots of hope.

5. Dot-com paper millionaires. You have to live in the San Francisco Bay Area to appreciate fully how these folks have changed the way things work. It's amazing what money will do, especially when it falls into the hands of a 20-something with no taste. San Francisco, the capital of dot-com mania, is transforming itself into a menagerie of so-called live/work renovated loft environments. What's interesting to me is that the new construction of live/work housing is fashioned in minimum-security prison style, with cameras, metal gates, cement stairways, and uninspired architecture. Creepy, actually.

The Top Five Flops of the Past 1,000 Years (or maybe just 1999)

1. Java and Jini. So where is this revolution? I'm waiting. I'm waiting.

2. Larry Ellison and the network computer. Need I say more? Perhaps Time magazine should have considered Ellison for Person of the Year. And perhaps it was in 1998 that the NC actually flopped. As far as I'm concerned, it was a bad idea from the beginning. Next in line for this role: the "Post PC" PC and so-called Internet Appliances.

3. FireWire. This technology will be the fiasco of the decade if it doesn't appear soon on something other than a Macintosh and a camcorder.

4. Microsoft Windows CE hand-held computers. When will Microsoft and its friends learn that building a lot of little computers around a portable OS that results in incompatibility from machine to machine for various reasons is not the road to success?

5. DIVX and similar schemes. Hey. Let's not forget DIVX. This was the lamebrained scheme to flood the market with disposable DVD disks that required special players. There was some interesting thinking behind the plan, but it was doomed from the beginning and officially died in 1999.

Those are some of my picks, and I'm sure I can expand my lists to ten or more per category. But let's use the collective wisdom of the PC Magazine readership and fill up the Talkback section below with your nominations for biggest events (or most important products) and biggest flops of 1999. Now's the time to praise the good and ridicule the bad. It will be your last chance this century! And please, no dirty words--they really drive the editors crazy!

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